Use of Text::ParseWords

[blackgoat]

Hi!

I am toatally new to perl and I was going through a tutorial and came across the following piece of code:

$_ = '"Jones, James", "Smith, Susan", Spot';
use Text::ParseWords;
@names = quotewords(",", 0, $_);
print join(" &", @names);

output: Jones, James & Smith, Susan & Spot

I didnt quite understand what it it does and how exactly it works.

Could anybody pls be kind enough to explain!

Thank You

[7stud]

You have a perl string containing this text:

"Jones, James", "Smith, Susan", Spot

The goal: split the string on the commas--but not where the commas are inside double quote marks.

A natural first thought might be to use split(). However, the code:

 my @pieces = split /,/, $string;

will split the string on every comma, giving you the pieces:

• "Jones
• James"
• "Smith
• Susan"
• Spot

The function quotewords() is in a module called Text::ParseWords, which is found here:

http://perldoc.perl.org/Text/ParseWords.html

and quotewords() accepts a list of lines and a delimiter and

breaks those lines up into a list of words ignoring delimiters that appear inside quotes.

In addition, if the second argument to quotewords() is false, e.g. 0, then quotewords() will strip the quote marks surrounding any of the pieces.

By looking at the result of the join():

Jones, James & Smith, Susan & Spot

you can tell what quotewords() returned as the pieces:

• Jones, James
• Smith, Susan
• Spot

[blackgoat]

Thank you so much.

[quester]

Text::ParseWords is a core Perl module. You can find its documentation here at perldoc.perl.org, along with lots of other useful documentation, tutorials, and FAQ's.

[Anonymous Monk]

quotewords is a function exported by Text::ParseWords (means you don't have to call it like Text::ParseWords::quotewords()))

[blackgoat]

What?

I did not quite understand what you mean. I did mention I'm totally new to this. Could you care to be more explicit pls.

Thank you very much

[Anonymous Monk]

No. Read perlintro, use, Tutorials: Simple Module Tutorial... Where and how to start learning Perl

[Anonymous Monk]

Perl (and really all code languages) are made up of various 'sets' of functions. You can bring in one of these sets with the 'use Text::ParseWords;' line, which enables you to use one of the functions in that set: 'quotewords'. I.e. if you remove that 'use' line from your file, the quotewords line will give you an error.

Code modularization and reuse are definitely important aspects of coding. I would say you should start to look into these topics in earnest once you have gotten comfortable writing a few 'basic hello world' examples from scratch on your own. In short: most advanced functionality you are looking for will be package in some module somewhere nowadays :). Hope that helps!