title: How can I suppress empty leading fields in Perl's split()?
body: <p>The <a href="http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfunc.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">perlfunc</a> entry for <a href="http://perldoc.perl.org/split.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">split</a> says:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>By default, empty leading fields are preserved</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Hinting that there's a way to over-ride that default, but later on all it says is:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Empty leading fields are produced when there are positive-width matches at the beginning of the string</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>...does this mean that there's no way to skip that first field?</p>
  
  <p>It's not mission-critical, but I'm splitting a root-relative URL, say <code>/foo/bar/</code>, on the slashes and getting</p>
  
  <pre><code>['', 'foo', 'bar']
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and wondering if there's a way to <em>not</em> get that blank first item.</p>