my @words = /("[^"]*"|'[^']*'|\S+)/g;
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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

According to my understanding of the original poster's goal, this is NOT the solution to his problem. Contrary to the poster's statement that he needs to make split "quote aware", I think he really wants to make it quote UN-aware, so that he can treat quotes as another delimiter character (this is what the sample assignment statement he offered accomplishes, of the form @array = ( "A", "B" ) being the resulting effect, for an original line of the form A "B"). Unless I'm misunderstanding his intentions, the proper solution would then be something akin to: my @words = split /[\s"']+/ (assuming it's not important to ensure balanced use of quotes)

Tim Maher
tim@consultix-inc.com
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Yes, I realized that a few minutes later and fixed it, a few minutes before you submitted your post. {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Oops! Now I see that the original poster's sample assignment was not as simple as I had shown, because he had "B C" where I had "B" (multiple quoted words being treated as a single token, vs. my idea of a single word). This being the case, my suggestion of changing split's delimiters will obviously not work, so "nevermind"! 8-}

Tim Maher
tim@consultix-inc.com
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Incidently, for solutions like this, is there an easy way of adding support for escaped quotes like \"?

-Ted

Yes, let someone else write and debug the code.

use Text::ParseWords;
my @words = shellwords($_);
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{grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Ah,
I'm impressed. The line was somewhat shorter than I had imagined....

My thanks,
JP

-- Alexander Widdlemouse undid his bellybutton and his bum dropped off --

Hmm. Not as impressive when you realize I left the quote marks on. {grin} A simple fix:

my @words = grep defined, /"([^"]*)"|'([^']*)'|(\S+)/g;
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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Heh, I thought the quotes being left in the @array was a "feature", so I:

foreach (@array) { s/"//g;  s/'//g; }
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Thanks all for your help,

JP Hindin,

-- Alexander Widdlemouse undid his bellybutton and his bum dropped off --

Yup, that'll be a talented regex hacker...

use Text::ParseWords qw( shellwords );
$line = q{Token1 Token2 "Little phrase" Token4};
@array = shellwords( $line );
print join( "\n", @array ), "\n";
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And that has the advantage of Text::ParseWords being core. If you don't mind fetching from CPAN, c.f. Text::Balanced and Regexp::Common.

Update: Of course I just now noticed that merlyn had mentioned Text::ParseWords above. /me should read the whole thread more carefully.

xoxo,
Andy
--
<megaphone> Throw down the gun and tiara and come out of the float! </megaphone>