2023-10: Partition with a Twist

Splitting delimited data into sub-arrays using partitioning on a delimiter character (or characters) is a fairly common operation in APL. For instance, if you partition the character vector "this is an example" on each occurrence of the space character, there would be 4 sub-arrays: "this" "is" "an" "example". This problem adds a slight twist to the operation in that the first argument indicates how many sub-arrays to return.

Write code that:

takes a non-negative integer first argument, N

takes a space-delimited character vector second argument, string

returns an array of length N where:

if N is less than or equal to the number of sub-arrays in string, the first N-1 elements of the result are the first N-1 space-delimited partitions in string.

The Nth element of the result is the remaining portion of string.

if N is greater than the number of sub-arrays, pad the result with as many empty arrays as necessary to achieve length N.

Note: Each space in string be considered as a delimiter. This means that leading, trailing, or contiguous spaces are potentially significant.