You can use the Java split(regex) method to achieve your first goal and then groovy syntactic sugar to help with the rest:
def str = ",,,,,"
def arr = str.split(/,/, -1)
println arr.size() // 6
arr[0] = 1
arr[1] = 2
arr[2] = 3
println arr // [1, 2, 3, , , ]
See also Groovy split csv and empty fields
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solved Split a string in groovy