The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition

2.8. Tokenizing a String

The split method parses a string and returns an array of tokens. It accepts two parameters, a delimiter and a field limit (which is an integer).

The delimiter defaults to whitespace. Actually, it uses $; or the English equivalent $FIELD_SEPARATOR. If the delimiter is a string, the explicit value of that string is used as a token separator.

s1 = "It was a dark and stormy night."
words = s1.split          # ["It", "was", "a", "dark", "and",
                          #  "stormy", "night"]
s2 = "apples, pears, and peaches"
list = s2.split(", ")     # ["apples", "pears", "and peaches"]

s3 = "lions and tigers and bears"
zoo = s3.split(/ and /)   # ["lions", "tigers", "bears"]

The limit parameter places an upper limit on the number of fields returned, according to these ...