Tokenize string with zero length components

[ssimop]

I am in need to tokenize a string which contains some zero length components as in the example which it follows :

Macro temp
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Code:

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str s="164```````````````123```"
ARRAY(str) arr
int nt = tok(s arr 16 "`")
out nt

In the above example nt is accessed as 2. I wonder whether there exists a flag to obtain the actual number of tokens, which is 16 in the above example.

Let me add that it works properly using a findrx routine, but programmatically it is slower.