Having a field separator character that may appear unescaped within a field seems like a bad idea. If you can discriminate the existing, genuine field separators well enough to convert non-field separator hyphens to underscores for disambiguation, it should be possible instead to convert the true field separators to unambiguous characters as your very first step and maybe preserve a bit more of your sanity: 

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $rec = 'A A Milne - Winnie-The-Pooh and Silver-Bear vol5-12 - Xi P
+ress - Peking (1998)';
 print qq{'$rec'};
 ;;
 my $rx_old_sep = qr{ \s+ - \s+ }xms;
 my $new_sep = '|';
 ;;
 $rec =~ s{ $rx_old_sep }{$new_sep}xmsg;
 print qq{'$rec'};
"
'A A Milne - Winnie-The-Pooh and Silver-Bear vol5-12 - Xi Press - Peki
+ng (1998)'
'A A Milne|Winnie-The-Pooh and Silver-Bear vol5-12|Xi Press|Peking (19
+98)'

[download]
The "fixed" file could then be written to disk to await further processing at your leisure.

Or, again assuming existing field separators are sufficiently unambiguous, just split each record to an array as the very first step and do all processing on the array elements.

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

In reply to Re: Regex Parsing Chars in a Line by AnomalousMonk
in thread Regex Parsing Chars in a Line by kel

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.