split-string bug in CVS tip of Emacs

[Peter Milliken]

I have taken to downloading the nightly tarball of the Emacs CVS repository
(I cannot download via CVS itself due to firewall restrictions). I have
noticed that some Elisp I use/wrote is failing when running using the CVS
tip versus the 21.3 release. I tracked the problem behaviour to split-string
in subr.el

The Elisp Manual (21-2.8) states (in part):

     When there is a match adjacent to the beginning or end of the
     string, this does not cause a null string to appear at the
     beginning or end of the list:

          (split-string "out to moo" "o+")
          => ("ut t" " m")

But using the CVS tip of Emacs I am getting this:

          (split-string "out to moo" "o+")
          => ("" "ut t" " m" "")

              ^
              |- this leading null string should not be there according to
Elisp 21-2.8 manual.


Is this a deliberate change to the behaviour of Emacs or is it a bug? i.e. I
was unable to "locate" the current Elisp manual in the repository - lack of
knowing what to search for I guess :-), so I was unable to check the latest
requirements on split-string.

Thanks
Peter

Peter Milliken
Software Engineer
ResMed
Phone: +61 2 9886-5059
Fax:   +61 2 9878-5564 


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