A workmate asked me the best way to convert all " quoted strings that span more than one line into a string with the newlines and surrounding whitespace compressed to a single space. Note: he does not need to worry about escaped " within the " strings.

To clarify, this input data: 

"boom"
hello "" bill
hello "  " bill
"baz
         hello
            jock"
"boom2"
 abc "baz2
hello2          
            jock2  "

[download]
should produce this output: 
"boom"
hello "" bill
hello "  " bill
"baz hello jock"
"boom2"
 abc "baz2 hello2 jock2  "

[download]

I suggested this code: 

use strict;
use warnings;

my $s = <<"GROK";
"boom"
hello "" bill
hello "  " bill
"baz
  \t   hello
            jock"
"boom2"
 abc "baz2
hello2     \t 
            jock2  "
GROK

$s =~ s{"([^"]*)"}
       { if ($1 =~ tr/\n//) {
            my $x = $1;
            $x =~ s/[ \t]*\n[ \t]*/ /g;
            '"' . $x . '"';
         }
         else {
            '"' . $1 . '"';
         }
       }eg;

[download]
Though this code does appear to work, improvements or advice are welcome. Also, there may be diabolical test data that breaks my code that I have missed. Admittedly the spec is a bit vague, but if you see some test data that breaks the code above, please let me know.

Update: Added extra line hello "  " bill to the test data to clarify the requirements. Thanks GrandFather. Also added extra space after jock2 to further clarify.

In reply to Changing quoted strings spanning more than one line by eyepopslikeamosquito

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