Like most of the other answers I will recommend
Text::CSV but with a hopefully helpful explanation. Your question is asking for comma separated fields but a field can also contain a comma (,) enclosed in quotes ("). What about a field that needs to have " characters in it as well? CSV has a standard way of handling all these issues and it is not so easy to do with one regex. What about a,b,c,"",e,f ? Again CSV will just handle it. The use of
List::Util suggested by
swl makes a good refinement but hopefully the example below is a start:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Modern::Perl;
use Text::CSV;
my $csv = Text::CSV->new;
my @strings = (
'a,"b,c",3,4,5,6',
'a,"b,c",3,4,5',
'a,"b,c",3,4,5,""',
'abc,def,"ghi,jkl",,mno,6'
);
foreach my $s (@strings) {
if (my $status = $csv->parse($s)) {
if ( (grep { /\w/ } $csv->fields) != 6 ) {
warn "row failed: ", $csv->string
}
}
else {
warn $csv->error_input
}
}