There's no easy way to do this with split. Split looks "locally", but you need to look much more globally - in fact, you may have to look at the entire string to determine whether there's a surrounding quote pair or not.

What you have sounds very much like a CSV file. If you can't (or don't want) to use a ready available CPAN module, I suggest to write a small parser. Either from scratch, by using Parse::RecDescent, or by using a nifty 5.10 regexp.

In reply to Re: Help with regex for complicated key=value string by JavaFan
in thread Help with regex for complicated key=value string by mscharrer

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