Quoted every word that is not already quoted is rather tough problem. Here is a trivial solution:

$word = qq("$word") if $word !~ /"/;
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foo,hello""world,bar
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Ever hear the one about about the $600 pen delevoped for space. It was painstakenly and expensively designed to work in zero gravity and extreme temperatures. The Russians used a pencil! :D

Lesson here, some things are quicker done by brute force.

Last question, how to pull out each word? Read the docs for one the CPAN modules mentioned above. There have been LOTS of questions asked on this site about parsing CSV files. Try super search on this site. i won't show you code, because i would just be copying the docs, but i will explain the process.

Basically, you open the file and read it one line at a time or slurp it into an array and process the lines that way (hint: while loop). Then you pass each line to a method provided by one of the CPAN modules mentioned above, and you get back a list of parsed scalars. You process those one at a time (hint: for loop) and determine if you need to add quotes or not (hint: regex).

What to do from there you never specfied, i would imagine the most usefull thing to do would be to save it back to another file.

jeffa

To make it work, you'd need to prepend a line to the csv files of the form:

0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10

where "," is replaced by the relevant delimiter, then do a SELECT * FROM datafile and dump the results in quotes as needed.

.02

cLive ;-)

ps - yes, the answer's deliberately fuzzy since I don't have time to double check my thoughts - perhaps someone else has a cleaner response?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $file = "question.lst";
my $newfile = "question2.lst";
my @newlines;

open(FILE, "<$file") || die "$!\n";
chomp(my @lines = <FILE>);
close FILE;

foreach(@lines) {
        s/\t/,/g; # substitute commas for any tabs
                  # This keeps the field delimiters all the same
                  # If your data is going to have tabs in it,
                  # remove that line

        my @elements = split(/,/, $_);

        # since the split splits the last and first name,
        # and the "City, State" fields
        # join them back together and remove the unnecessary
        # elements
        $elements[0] = "$elements[0],$elements[1]";
        $elements[4] = "$elements[4], $elements[5]";
        splice(@elements, 1, 1);
        splice(@elements, 4, 1);

        # If the elements aren't already enclosed in quotes,
        # enclose them.
        foreach(@elements) {
                $_ = qq("$_") unless (m/\".*\"/);
        }

        # Join the elements of the line back together
        # and push them to a new array
        my $newline = join(",", @elements);
        push(@newlines, $newline);
}


# Print the information to a new file
open(NEWFILE, ">$newfile") || die "$!\n";
foreach(@newlines) {print NEWFILE "$_\n";}
close NEWFILE;
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Here's the input file (question.lst)...

"Smith, Robert",94 N. Orange Grove,# 25,West Hollywood,CA,90046,(323)5
+55-1234,931
"Jones, Bob"    111 S. Orange Grove     # 72    Silverlake,CA   90210,
+(323)555-5555,931
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Here's the output file (question2.lst)...

"Smith, Robert","94 N. Orange Grove","# 25","West Hollywood, CA","9004
+6","(323)555-1234","931"
"Jones, Bob","111 S. Orange Grove","# 72","Silverlake, CA","90210","(3
+23)555-5555","931"
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Hope that helps...

open(FILE,"+<tabs.txt") or die "Couldn't open tabs.txt: $!";
my @file = <FILE>; 
seek(FILE,0,0);
foreach(@file) {
     s/\t/,/g;
     print FILE $_;
}
close(FILE);
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Now for putting quotes around your values:

open(FILE,"+<tabs.txt") or die "Couldn't open tabs.txt: $!";
my @file = <FILE>; 
seek(FILE,0,0);
 foreach(@file) {
     chomp();
     my $line = "";
     my(@values) = split(/\,/,$_);
     foreach my $value(@values) {
          $value = "\"$value\"" if $value !~ /^\".*?\"$/;
          $line .= "$value,";
     }
     chop($line);   
     print FILE "$line\n";
} 
close(FILE);
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