Field splitting in backquote substitutions (fwd)

Field splitting in backquote substitutions (fwd)

[David Shepherd]

Mark-Jason Dominus has said:
>     The field splitting rule in rc is very consistent.  If $ifs is 
> (' ' '\t' '\n'), then any space, tab, or newline starts a new field.
> 
> This means that if you do someting like
> 
> 	for (i in `{echo 'foo  to   you'} )
> 		echo $i
> 
> you get
> 
> 	foo
> 
> 	to
> 
> 
> 	you
> 
> which is probably not what you wanted, and maybe not what you expected
> either since the csh and sh backquotes would have yielded
> 
> 	foo
> 	to
> 	you
> 
> instead.
> 
>     In awk, FS can be an arbitrary regular expression, and any string
> which matches FS is taken as a field separator.  But there's a special
> case: if FS is a single blank, then it really means that any sequence of
> spaces, tabs, and/or newlines constitute a field separator.

isn't the behaviour that you (and probably i) expect exactly what strtok
gives you ... ie strtok(str,seps) considers str to consist of a list of
tokens seperated by one *or more* characters from sep. if this splitting
is implemented by strtok then it would be "intuitively correct".

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
david shepherd: des@inmos.co.uk or des@inmos.com    tel: 0454-616616 x 379
                inmos ltd, 1000 aztec west, almondsbury, bristol, bs12 4sq
		"pugh,  pugh,  barney mcgrew, cuthbert,  dibble,  grubb !"