Comma Delimited Problems

Kevman has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a file which is comma delimited, that needs to
be read into arrays.

This would be easy with

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $line;

open (FH, "< ./kevtest.dat") || die "Couldn't open ./kevtest.dat: $!";

#Read in all the lines
my @lines = <FH>;
chomp @lines;

for $line (@lines) {
    $line =~ s/\"//g;
   print STDERR "$line\n";
}

#Close the file
close FH  || die "Couldn't ./fred.dat\n";
[download]

However, the file can contain

field 1, "field 2, has a comma", field 3
If I strip `"` then I will get 4 elements in @lines, not 3.

Help pls?

Kev

Comment on Comma Delimited Problems Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Comma Delimited Problems by arden (Curate) on Mar 09, 2004 at 14:55 UTC
See Text::CSV or any of the CSV modules at CPAN for that matter. It'll make your life much easier! - - arden.	[reply]
Re: Re: Comma Delimited Problems by Kevman (Pilgrim) on Mar 09, 2004 at 15:01 UTC
Thks for the quick responses all - I'll take a look in cpan Kev	[reply]
Re: Comma Delimited Problems by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Mar 09, 2004 at 14:57 UTC
I'd recommend Text::xSV (written by our tilly), which solves some edge cases that Text::CSV misses, and allows any single-character separator to be used. ------ We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age. Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.	[reply]
Re: Comma Delimited Problems by Tomte (Priest) on Mar 09, 2004 at 14:57 UTC
I suggest Text::CSV or yet better under some circumstances DBD::CSV CVS is a very ugly wheel one usually does not want to reinvent :) regards, tomte Hlade's Law: If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person -- they will find an easier way to do it.	[reply]
Re: Comma Delimited Problems by Happy-the-monk (Canon) on Mar 09, 2004 at 15:10 UTC
If you can access the Perl Cookbook, there's a gleeful recipe at pages 44ff. Sören	[reply]
Re: Comma Delimited Problems by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Mar 09, 2004 at 15:25 UTC
Untested: `use Regexp::Common; /$RE{list}{-pat => "\\w+\|$RE{quoted}"}/;` [download] Although this only matches the entire 'list', it doesn't capture the individual elements. Abigail	[reply] [d/l]