From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: David Shepherd <des@inmos.com>
Subject: Field splitting in backquote substitutions (fwd)
To: rc@archone.tamu.edu
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 1991 12:10:13 -0500
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Message-ID: <19910628171013.A4qGhmjWC5_na0PnO9YvWHu5oUPrDlBiYlIRTIT26lc@z>

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".

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david shepherd: des@inmos.co.uk or des@inmos.com    tel: 0454-616616 x 379
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