Simple way to parse whitespace separated, optionally quoted words out of a string

I recently needed to parse words separated by whitespace out of a string, where a doublequoted word may contain spaces itself but no escaped doublequotes. The following regex will do, is quite tidy and also hardly backtracks (occasionally by a few characters, not more).

my @words = /"?((?<!")\S+(?!"\s)|[^"]+)"?\s*/g;

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Re: Simple way to parse whitespace separated, optionally quoted words out of a string by japhy (Canon) on Nov 16, 2002 at 15:30 UTC
Your method has its flaws. It does not require proper balancing of quotes, and it breaks `q{"oops"I did it again"}` into `q{oops}` and `q{I did it again}` -- that is, two strings, where it should be five. It also returns `q{""}` for the string `q{""}`, when it should probably return just an empty string (`q{}`). _____________________________________________________ Jeff`[japhy]`Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker, who'd like a job (NYC-area) `s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;`	[reply]
Re^2: Simple way to parse whitespace separated, optionally quoted words out of a string by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Nov 17, 2002 at 06:48 UTC
Thanks for your points. The latter was easy to fix, but the first one caused me a fair bit of work and I wasn't able to come up with a solution that worked with only a single capturing pair of parens (my original goal). The following shouldn't fail regardless of how pathological the case you throw at it gets, but requires a grep. `my @word = do { my $i=0; grep $i++&1, m/ (")? ((?(1) [^"]* \| \S+)) \1\s* /xg };` [download] Correct, but not nearly as neat as before. `:-/` It does have the advantage that it can easily be extended to accept single quotes as well, though. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply] [d/l]