how to handle commas that belong in the data value

If quotes are used to disambiguate, it's fairly easy to parse with a regex:

local $_ = q(one, two, "three, four", five, six);
my @words = m(
  \s*        # gobble any leading whitespace
  (          # capture either:
    "[^"]+"  #   a group of quoted letters
  |          # or
    [^,]+    #   a group of non-quoted letters, except commas
  )
  (?:,|$)    # anchor the match to a comma, or end of string
)gx;

[download]

Of course, that suffers from other problems, such as going all wonky with unbalanced quotes. But it's a fairly simple way to parse well-formed data, and I thought it might be helpful for some to look at.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Comma separated list into a hash by revdiablo
in thread Comma separated list into a hash by Anonymous Monk

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