http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=298362

zemplen has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am having problems with quotewords. Using an editor create a file entering the following text and seperating the fields with a tab character.
1 2 3 4 foo bar 7 8 9 ' "
Why doesn't quotewords break out the list?
Thanks 
   use Text::ParseWords;

   open (MASTER, "<master.txt");

   $delim = "\t";
   $master = <MASTER>;
   chomp $master;
   @list = &quotewords(${delim}, 1, ${master});
   close (MASTER);

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Re: quotewords doesn't return a list
by Enlil (Parson) on Oct 10, 2003 at 18:57 UTC
    The quotes are what is messing it up and causing the unexpected behaviour. Since it doesn't find a matching closing quote it fails to match, and returns nothing. I am assuming that the advantage over this module over just using split is that you can tokenise something like 
    "foo\tbar"\tfoo\tbar\t'bar\t\tbar'

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    into: 
    foo\tbar
foo
bar
bar\t\tbar

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    instead of just splitting at every \t (in this case).

    -enlil

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Re: quotewords doesn't return a list
by snax (Hermit) on Oct 10, 2003 at 18:41 UTC
    It does here. Update: No, it doesn't. My mistake; I completely missed seeing the single and double quotes at the end of the input data (props to Enlil). Sorry :(

    Suggestions:

  • Check to see if you are opening the file properly: use the or die "Useful message here: $?" idiom
  • Your chunk above doesn't print anything or do anything with @list -- is it just a case of not really looking at your variables?
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      Adding a print statment or using the debugger shows that @list is empty.
      If I add $master = "1    2    3    4    foo  bar    7    8    9"; to the program then it returns a list as expected. The problem appears to be tied to getting the data from a file.
      I am running Activestate perl, v5.8.0 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread
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        How odd. Using a file (master.txt as you suggest) and the offered input data (tab separated) 
        1 2 3 4 foo bar 7 8 9

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        I have no problems: I get a list as expected. However, after adding a single and double quote 
        1 2 3 4 foo bar 7 8 9 ' "

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        things behave as you describe: an empty list results. As such I concluded that Enlil got it right, and there's a bug/behavior problem associated with unmatched quotes in the Text::ParseWords module.

        I'm testing this with 5.8.0 (Cygwin) and 5.6.1 (Activestate).

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