Might be a dumb question, but is there a module or some easy method to parse pipe-delimited text strings that might actually contain a pipe character?

Yes it's easy to use split to split up a string, but my text contains some real pipe characters. It uses the Excel-type formatting where double-quotes surround the whole string that contains the pipe text, e.g.

"A bunch of pipes: ||| right here"|next column|last column

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I can bend my brain trying to do this with regex's but then I'd have to account for other characters such as double quotes, and I'm betting someone has figured this out already. I know CSV parsers can handle this sort of thing, maybe there's a CSV parser that allows different delimiters?

thanks!

In reply to Parsing pipe-delimited text that contains pipes by slugger415

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