Re: Recommendations for parsing invalid CSV

You could use look-behind (?<= ) and look-ahead (?= ) expressions to look only for quotes which are not beside a comma or at end and start of the line:
s/(?<=.)(?<!,)"(?!,|$)/\\"/g A simple test in the command line brings me:

user@machine$ perl -pe 's/(?<=.)(?<!,)"(?!,|$)/\\"/g' 
"call from "friend"","call from "friend"","call from "friend""
"call from \"friend\"","call from \"friend\"","call from \"friend\""
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The 2nd line is input, the 3rd output.

Looks good for me. Some special cases with escaped commas inside the strings might not match correctly. You should check this.

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Re^2: Recommendations for parsing invalid CSV by markjugg (Curate) on Apr 21, 2008 at 15:24 UTC
mscharrer, I didn't mean for anyone else to do my work for me, but I certainly don't mind the help! Thank you! That's the kind of code I would need to write if the new release of Text::CSV_XS turns out not to work for some reason. Mark Stosberg	[reply]