However, I must admit that I prefer JScript’s way of handling splits which contain capturing groups.

Would I be right in assuming that you have shown us a simplified version of your original problem, since I cannot see a reason why you would want it to behave like this?

That’s right. In general this is a useful feature for building simple parsers. In my case been playing with a port of SimpleTest’s stack-based lexer into Javascript, so this was something buried fairly deep in the code.

import java.util.regex.*;

public class Split {
    public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception{
        Pattern splitter = Pattern.compile("(:)");
        String str = "a:b:c";
        String [] pieces = null;
        pieces = splitter.split(str);
        for (int i = 0 ; i < pieces.length ; i++) {
            System.out.println(pieces[i]);
        }
    }
}

Results in;

a
b
c

So who’s in the wrong here? Personally, coming from a Java background I’d expect it to be handled the way it does in IE although a better solution would be to have an additional parameter to say whether the seperator is included in the output. Then everyone would be happy: :-)