How can I limit the number of returned items in Perl's split?

Question

I got a problem when I parse a complex file which include thousands of lines.

I already implemented my Perl script like this days ago.

 my ($head, $tail) = split /=/, $line;

Nearly all my source file $line style as below:

constant normalLines = <type value>     /*  hello world  */

and I can get the output $tail = /* hello world */

Today I found a bug when I parse the line like this (there are two = in the line)

constant specialLine = <type value>     /*  hello = world  */

But now the output is $tail = /* hello

How can I fix my bug still using split() in my code above? I still want the output $tail = /* hello = world */

Answer 1

You can specify the limit parameter to tell split how many parts you want at most:

# split /PATTERN/,EXPR,LIMIT

my ($head, $tail) = split /=/, $line, 2;

Answer 2

@Thilo is exactly right about how you can fix this, but the source of the problem is that you were doing a list assignment in a way that caused list items to be dropped. Doing the split like you had would result in the following list:

  ["constant specialLine ", " <type value>     /*  hello ", " world  */"]

When you use that in a list assignment, you take the first two values and the rest are thrown away.