quotewords doesn't return a list

zemplen has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am having problems with quotewords. Using an editor create a file entering the following text and seperating the fields with a tab character.
1 2 3 4 foo bar 7 8 9 ' "
Why doesn't quotewords break out the list?
Thanks

   use Text::ParseWords;

   open (MASTER, "<master.txt");

   $delim = "\t";
   $master = <MASTER>;
   chomp $master;
   @list = &quotewords(${delim}, 1, ${master});
   close (MASTER);
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Comment on quotewords doesn't return a list Download Code

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Re: quotewords doesn't return a list by Enlil (Parson) on Oct 10, 2003 at 18:57 UTC
The quotes are what is messing it up and causing the unexpected behaviour. Since it doesn't find a matching closing quote it fails to match, and returns nothing. I am assuming that the advantage over this module over just using split is that you can tokenise something like `"foo\tbar"\tfoo\tbar\t'bar\t\tbar'` [download] into: `foo\tbar foo bar bar\t\tbar` [download] instead of just splitting at every \t (in this case). -enlil	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: quotewords doesn't return a list by snax (Hermit) on Oct 10, 2003 at 18:41 UTC
It does here. Update: No, it doesn't. My mistake; I completely missed seeing the single and double quotes at the end of the input data (props to Enlil). Sorry :( Suggestions: Check to see if you are opening the file properly: use the `or die "Useful message here: $?"` idiom Your chunk above doesn't print anything or do anything with `@list` -- is it just a case of not really looking at your variables?	[reply]
Re: Re: quotewords doesn't return a list by zemplen (Novice) on Oct 10, 2003 at 19:12 UTC
Adding a print statment or using the debugger shows that @list is empty. If I add `$master = "1 2 3 4 foo bar 7 8 9";` to the program then it returns a list as expected. The problem appears to be tied to getting the data from a file. I am running Activestate perl, v5.8.0 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Re: quotewords doesn't return a list by snax (Hermit) on Oct 10, 2003 at 19:58 UTC
How odd. Using a file (master.txt as you suggest) and the offered input data (tab separated) `1 2 3 4 foo bar 7 8 9` [download] I have no problems: I get a list as expected. However, after adding a single and double quote `1 2 3 4 foo bar 7 8 9 ' "` [download] things behave as you describe: an empty list results. As such I concluded that Enlil got it right, and there's a bug/behavior problem associated with unmatched quotes in the `Text::ParseWords` module. I'm testing this with 5.8.0 (Cygwin) and 5.6.1 (Activestate).	[reply] [d/l] [select]