-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Say, you're right! Except it's in Text::ParseWords rather than Shell::ParseWords, but you pointed me in the right direction. I owe you a beer, man.

Alan "Hot Pastrami" Bellows

$x=0; $in=0;
$string =~ s#(")?([^" ]+)(")?#
if ($in) {
  print $2;
  if ($3) { print "\n"; $in=0; }
  else    { print " "; }
}
else {
  print "[".$x++."] $2";
  if ($in=$1) { print " ";}
  else        { print "\n"; }
}
#egx;
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Could be more compact probably, but I left it "apart" for easier viewing. :)

That's pretty good, but what if I tried to escape a quote with a backslash?

qq|look, these "words" are \"quoted\"!|;

# results #

[0] look,
[1] these
[2] words are quoted
[3] !
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It's probably a recursive check, which makes it very tough to do as a regex. (Hey, I'm not complaining about your solution, just making sure that people realize a regex won't catch all cases here!)

Oh sure, change the data after the question has been answered! :)

I wasn't going to reply after merlyn took all the fun out of it by pointing at somebody else's wheel. (: Beside, the first thing that popped into my head required that you have a character that you knew wasn't in the string (a sure sign of a bad hack). Then I had a flash...

s#"([^"]*)"# my $i= $1; $i =~ tr/ /"/ #ge;
my @list= grep { tr/"/ / || 1 } split / +/;
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Note that this has several disadvantages over a good module:

• You can't escape quotes (neither inside nor out).
• Unmatched quotes are silently processed in a rather strange way.
• tabs do not separate fields.
• Only one type of quoting is supported.

So it is probably still a bad hack.

while ($string =~ /([^"]*)"([^"]*)"(.*)/g) {
    push @result, ((split " ", $1), $2);
    $string = $3;
}
push @result, split " ", $string if $string;
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I did this just to show that a quick hack is possible, even in a one liner... I love map.

my $string = q|Are "Perl Monks" required to swear an "Oath of Celibacy
+?"|;

my @broken = map { /"([^"]+)"/ ? $1 : split }  split /\s?([^"]+")\s?/,
+ $string;

print "[$_] $broken[$_]\n" foreach 0 .. $#broken;
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--
Casey

@parts = grep /\w/, (split /\"([^\"]*)\"|\s/, $string);
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