Ah, neat. I made a couple of small modification, and now I'm very close. The trouble left now is how to capture an empty field - i.e. where I have two delimiter characters next to each other I should emit an empty chunk, instead of no chunk. Still stuck on that. What I have so far:


my $re = qr{
  (?>      # don't backtrack into this group
     !!    # either the escape character,
           # followed by an escape character
     |     # or
     !;    # escape followed by delimiter char
     |     # or
   [^;\n]  # a character that is neither delimiter
           # character or a newline
  )+
}x;

while(<>) {
    chomp;
    $str = $_;
    print "$_\n";
    while ($str =~ /($re)/g) {
        print "  Chunk '$1' => ";
        $s = $1;
        $s =~ s/!!(?=(!|;))/!/g;
        print "$s\n";
    }
}

[download]

Example of paired delimiters (;;)

a!!val!!;;bv!!al;;
  Chunk 'a!!val!!' => a!!val!!
  Chunk 'bv!!al' => bv!!al

[download]

In reply to Re^2: split on delimiter unless escaped by yrp001
in thread split on delimiter unless escaped by yrp001

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