I had some confusion with the String.split function in yesterday’s exercises.
The documentation says that the trim: true option removes empty strings from the resulting list.
The important term here is “empty”, not “blank” or “whitespace”. My Python-brain was still thinking of trim (or strip) options meaning whitespace is stripped from start/end of the source string.
For example:
iex(1)> " bobby jones " |> String.split("", trim: true)
[" ", " ", "b", "o", "b", "b", "y", " ", " ", "j", "o", "n", "e", "s", " ", " "]What I found more confusing, is the behavior when the trim: true option is not used when splitting a string into graphemes:
iex(2)> " bobby jones " |> String.split("")
["", " ", " ", "b", "o", "b", "b", "y", " ", " ", "j", "o", "n", "e", "s", " ",
" ", ""]
iex(3)> "" |> String.split("")
["", ""]Splitting an empty string into graphemes returns two empty strings.
I found a discussion on Elixir Forum where @sergio asked this question and @whatyouhide from the Elixir core team answered:
“You can think of it as there’s an empty string between every pair of graphemes in a string. There’s also an empty string between the start of the string and the first grapheme, sort of. It also helps with having some properties that hold true for String.split/2.”
All notes and comments are my own opinion. Follow me at @rgacote@genserver.social