I'm confused about why using an empty string as a delimiter in PowerShell's `-split` operator gives me a result of 5 when I expected it to return 3. It seems like the split is splitting off empty spaces at both the beginning and end of my string, which I find really puzzling. I'm aware of the `ToCharArray()` method, but I'm trying to get my head around this concept as part of a tutorial exercise.
1 Answer
The reason you're seeing that result is because `-split` treats the empty string as a regex delimiter, splitting at every position, including before the first character and after the last one. This means that your output includes those additional blank elements. If you run this snippet:
```powershell
$string = 'foo'
[regex]::Split($string, '').Count
```
You'll see it also returns 5. If you want to filter out those empty strings, you could use:
```powershell
($string -split '' | Where-Object { $_ -ne '' }).Count
```
This approach correctly counts just the characters. Another way could be using string indexing or enumeration to get your desired output without empty elements.
Thanks for clarifying! It makes a lot more sense now, but it still feels a bit counterintuitive. I guess I’ll just have to keep this in mind for future coding!