I'm not comfortable that your description of the data-set is complete enough to provide a answer with any degree of confidence that it will "just work." But assuming you've got quoted fields delimited by a space character, use Text::CSV, and set sep_char => q{ }, # 0x20.

CPAN is how you "do that in Perl."

Update: An example is in order:

use Text::CSV;

my $csv = Text::CSV->new( {
    sep_char => q/ /, # 0x20
    escape_char => q/\\/, # Single backslash escapes.
} );

while( my $row = $csv->getline(\*DATA) ) {
    print '[', join( ']  [', @{$row} ), "]\n";
}

__DATA__
"qazwsx" "edcrfv" "tgbyhn"
"asdf" "ghjk" "l;zx" "cv\"bn"

[download]

...which will produce the following output...

[qazwsx]  [edcrfv]  [tgbyhn]
[asdf]  [ghjk]  [l;zx]  [cv"bn]

[download]

I threw in an escaped quote character just for fun.


Dave

In reply to Re: extracting data from a file by davido
in thread extracting data from a file by indy07

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