I'm afraid this may sound like anathema to folks here, but to my ear,
string-splitting is such a Perlish thing to do. It's just begging for
a regular expression. Just the other day, I found cl-ppcre[1] (and
gushed about it elsewhere). And that has a gorgeous cl-ppcre:split.
So, using Quasi's example:
> I have to split a string from /proc/net/arp of the format
> "127.0.0.1 0x1 0x2 00:11:22:33:AE:5E * ethx"
;; tokenize base on whitespace...
(cl-ppcre:split "\\s\\s*" proc-net-arp-line)
;; ... and then tokenize based on colons
(cl-ppcre:split ":" mac-address-field).
[1] www.weitz.de/cl-ppcre, conveniently BSD-licensed for corporate
consumption.
-JT