I hate to post regex questions, but I'm second-guessing myself every time I think I make progress.

The problem: I have a CSV file that Text::CSV is handling very nicely.

Unfortunately, it will balk on data like this:
"crosby","stills","nash","and sometimes "young""
The input can include any number of characters, and unfortunately, I don't have control over the input to tell people "hey, don't use anything but letters or numbers!" Believe you me, I'd love to put some constraints on their input, but it's a proprietary tool, and, well, I could lecture until I was blue in the face and some snot-nosed kid would immediately enter every non-alphanumeric character he could find.
I had tried this, but it's not right:
if ($line =~ m/".?".?".?"/g)

[download]

because it will match the "," that I'm trying to delimit with. My next thought was something like this:
if ($line =~ m/"[^\,]?"[^\,]?"[^\,]?"/g)

[download]

but that would only work if a comma were a class of character... And probably not even then ;) I guess in pseudo-code, I'm after something like this:
if ($line =~ m/"(ANY # OF NON-COMMAS)"(ANY # OF NON-COMMAS)"(ANY # OF 
+NON-COMMAS)"/g)

[download]

Can anyone who has been through this kind of nightmare help me?

Thanks,
cidaris

In reply to CSV and regex mixups by cidaris

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