Re: csv'ish string with parens that include commas

[james2vegas]

Use Regexp::Common::list, something like this (presuming your strings and all word characters):

use Regexp::Common 'list';
my $re = qr{
        \w+  # word characters (word or function name)
        (?:\($RE{list}{-pat=>'\w+'}\))? # (optional parameters)
        }x;
my $x = 'joe,sam,x(monkey,lemur)';
my @x = ($x =~ m{$re}g);
print join("\n", @x);

returns:

joe
sam
x(monkey,lemur)

[ascetic]

Thanks. Actually, some of the args will be numbers, but I should be able to take it from here.

I also looked at using Text::Balanced for a bit, but it seemed like using a hammer to drive a screw.

[james2vegas]

\w matches letters, digts and underscore, so that should be sufficient.