Quite complicated, your code ;-)

Yep, that's the source of the problem ;)

As for regexes - I'm not very good with them so I fell back on the c-style approach. I'm not sure how to add line numbers - can this be done though Perlmonks?

As for Text::CSV - I can't install modules on the server (I can upload pure-perl ones though). I definately don't have a problem with using them for these type of tedious, error-prone endeavours. Any suggestions of alternatives are welcome.

You're quite right about $dataString - I moved it out of the loop and it gets rid of the errors. The out.csv file is still just a bunch of quotes and commas.

Here's the slightly modified code:

Thanks for the help :)

You have to provide us with line numbers. This can't be done on perlmonks. You can get them with:

perl -pe '$_="$.: $_"' your_input > your_output
[download]

I'm not sure how your desired output should look like. Maybe this will help you. It uses RegEx:

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<DATA>) {
  my (@fields)= split /, /;
  foreach (@fields) {
    if (s/^"((?:[^"\\]|\\.)*)"$/$1/) {
      #correct
      tr/\\//d; # No more \
      print "$_\n";
    }
  }
}
__END__
"Perlmonks", "http://www.perlmonks.org", "excellent ;)"
"csv", "csv\"xxx", "trall\ala"
[download]

Short explanation for the RegEx:

/^"((?:[^"\\]|\\.)*)"$/$1/

^"

matches your field's quotechar at the start of the field

(...)

will "remember" what was matched inside the quotes

(?:...)*

This will match anything in place of the ... and tells the parser that it may apear as often as possible. Even zero times

[^"\\]

will match any character but " and \

|

is an alternative. Either the left or the right part has to match

\\.

Will match any "escaped" character

"$

again your quotechar but now at the end

Thanks for the excellent explanation :)

With regards to the error line numbers: there aren't any errors anymore - it just doesn't produce the desired results. I have a feeling it's quite a ways away as well - your approach is far clearer.

One question about the split if it's fed data like:

"csv", "csv\"x, xx", "trall\ala"

It will choke on the second entry. How would I go about avoiding this? I could use something like split/","/; which would make problems far less likely, but is there a better way? Some sort of notation for when it's inside the field?

" I can't install modules on the server..."

Oh, yes you can! :)

See I don't have permission to install a module on the system! for how.

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)