I'm trying to parse a very general list of parameters. The parameters may be real numbers, quoted text strings, or bracketed sets of such parameters, in any order. Parameters are comma and optional whitespace separated. Balanced extract_multiple looked like what I wanted, and it mostly works, but fails when it gets a real number field or empty field. It seems that the regexp match is not working as I expected and causing it to think its done. Here's the code and results: 
    print "ps before=$param_string\n";
    my @ef = (extract_multiple($param_string,
                             [
                               sub { extract_delimited($_[0]) },
                               sub { extract_bracketed($_[0]) },
                               sub { extract_variable($_[0]) },
                               qr/([^,]+)(.*)/,
                             ],
                              undef,1));
    print "extracted=@ef\n\n";

Results:
ps before=0.0, 0.0, 0.0, @inches, 0.0, 0.0, [0.0,0.0,'PI$pxtr19i'] 
extracted=0.0

ps before=0.0,0.0,0.0,@inches,0.0,0.0,[0.0,0.0,'PI$pxtr19i'] 
extracted=0.0

ps before= "TERMINAL_DRILL_SIZE", "", , @scale , , [0.034, 0.0]
extracted="TERMINAL_DRILL_SIZE" ""  


If I remove the regexp match like this:
    my @ef = (extract_multiple($param_string,
                             [
                               sub { extract_delimited($_[0]) },
                               sub { extract_bracketed($_[0]) },
                               sub { extract_variable($_[0]) },
                               #qr/([^,]+)(.*)/,
                             ],
                              undef,1));

then the results are:
ps before=0.0, 0.0, 0.0, @inches, 0.0, 0.0, [0.0,0.0,'PI$pxtr19i'] 
extracted=@inches [0.0,0.0,'PI$pxtr19i']

ps before=0.0,0.0,0.0,@inches,0.0,0.0,[0.0,0.0,'PI$pxtr19i'] 
extracted=@inches [0.0,0.0,'PI$pxtr19i']

ps before= "TERMINAL_DRILL_SIZE", "", , @scale , , [0.034, 0.0]
extracted="TERMINAL_DRILL_SIZE" "" @scale [0.034, 0.0]

[download]
I've patterned this after the example in the docs of parsing CSV text. Any clues why the regexp portion does not seem to do what the docs say?

In reply to Text::Balanced extract_multiple does not return all values by JohnRuf

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