OK, printline could be a function/method, eg:

my $s = "This is a string";
while ($s =~ s/^(\w+ ?)//) {printline($1);}

sub printline {
  my $word = shift;
  print $word, "\n"; # or, less clear but all on one line: print $_[0], "\n";
}

In that case your example would indeed have done as you suggested, and printed one word per line. The bracket - printline() - just helps make it a bit clearer and less ambiguous, and means printline doesn't need to be pre-declared.

And of course I need to point out that

should read

print join "\n", split / /, "This is a string";

otherwise \n is interpreted literally - This\nis\na\nstring - which I'm sure was originally a typo and you knew that already

Of course, most of the time you're not dealing with a hard coded string but a variable, so

$var =~ tr/ /\n/;

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

oh, what i was thinking for printline(str) was more something like: sub printline(str) {print str; print "\n";} and by "exercise for the reader" i just meant i was too lazy to type out the extra parts or think of a good way to put that newline character at the end of the string and so just fudged it.

EDIT oh nevermind thats the same as what you did, i just was having problems reading and thinking on that day i guess

Just for the record the obvious way to do it in python (which is usually the best), is

s = "This is a string"
for w in s.split():
    print w

_________________
The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world.
-- seen on the net

You can also do that last example in Perl too:

$s = "This is a string";
foreach $w (split(' ', $s)) {
    print "$w\n";
}

Or a bit less verbose:

$s = "This is a string";
for (split(' ', $s)) {
    print "$_\n";
}