http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=363646


in reply to Regex Conundrum

There is a standard solution to this problem, mostly from Mastering Regular Expressions:

# You need to match a double quoted string with the following regex # [^"\\]*(\\.[^"\\]*)*",? # # But to get the text between double quotes use some ( ) # ([^"\\]*(\\.[^"\\]*)*)",? # gets text inside quotes as $1 # # but you also have non quoted fields, thus # ([^,]+),? # which should match things optionally followed by a comma # # and then a match for separation commas # , # # this must be repeated with m/.../g

Before attempting this yourself, take at look at Text::ParseWords and the quotewords routine. This should solve your problem. If the module is not available to you then the following untested code from Mastering Regular Expressions should work:

@fields = (); while ($text =~ m/"([^"\\]*(\\.[^"\\]*)*)",?|([^,]+),?|,/g { push (@fields, defined ($1) ? $1 : $3) ; } push (@fields, undef) if $text =~ m/,$/; # Account for the special cas +e of an empty last field. # all data is now in @fields

Note: untested.


SciDude
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