Some time ago, I was looking at splitting text with Elisp, Perl, Ruby and Common Lisp. Yesterday, when I again had to do quite the same thing, it occurred to me that the Common Lisp solution was unnecessary complex/long. I’m not a Perl guru, but I believe the following is probably hard to beat even with Perl:
CL-USER> (format t "~{<li>~A</li>~%~}" (cl-ppcre:split "\|""Kim Wilde|Transvision Vamp|Ideal|Siouxsie and the Banshees|Nena|Iggy Pop"))
<li>Kim Wilde</li><li>Transvision Vamp</li><li>Ideal</li><li>Siouxsie and the Banshees</li><li>Nena</li><li>Iggy Pop</li>
NIL
For the uninitiated, it’s not the cl-ppcre library which is interesting here but the built-in iteration facilities of format. See the Hyperspec on the control-flow features of format for details. Now, I usually tend to avoid the mini languages that come with Common Lisp like the one of format or loop when writing real programs, but when using Lisp as a glorified shell they come in very handy.
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