Can I save the split character of a string in Perl [duplicate]

Question

I want to split a multi sentence paragraph into its constituent sentences whilst retaining the split characters ie the '. ? !'. The code I'm using is:

my @Sentence = split(/[\.\?\!]/,$Paragraph);

Is there any way that I can save those sentence terminators?

Answer 1

Yes, if you add parentheses around the delimiter, they will be included in the result list.

my @Sentence = split /([\.\?\!])/, $Paragraph;

E.g. if you have the string foo.bar.baz before you would get qw(foo bar baz), and with parentheses you would get qw(foo . bar . baz).

In case you want to keep the delimiters attached to the sentence, you could use a lookbehind assertion

my @Sentence = split /(?<=[\.\?\!])/, $Paragraph;
# result qw(foo. bar. baz)

If you want to strip unnecessary spaces after the match, you could use /(?<=[\.\?\!]) */.