in reply to Workaround for my CSV file

Assuming that you really can't use a module (but see Yes, even you can use CPAN), a simple regex substitution does the trick:

use strict;
use warnings;

open my $fh, ">", "tmp.csv" or die "Unable to open $! \n";
#read the file line by line and delimit with commas
print join ",", map {s/(.*,.*)/"$1"/; $_} split /~/ while <DATA>;
close $fh;

__DATA__
col1~col2~col3~col4~col5
data11~data12~data13~data14~data15
data21~data22~data23~data24~data25
data31~data32~data33~data34~data35
data,data41~data42~data43~data44~data45
data51,data52,data,junk,specialchar,sometingdata53~data54~data55

[download]

Prints:

col1,col2,col3,col4,col5
data11,data12,data13,data14,data15
data21,data22,data23,data24,data25
data31,data32,data33,data34,data35
"data,data41",data42,data43,data44,data45
"data51,data52,data,junk,specialchar,sometingdata53",data54,data55

[download]
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Re^2: Workaround for my CSV file
by gone2015 (Deacon) on Dec 05, 2008 at 11:44 UTC

    ...and, if you want to allow '"' in the fields you can extend that to:

    use strict ; use warnings ;

print join ",", map { if (m/[,"]/) { s/(\A|"|\n|(?<!\n)\Z)/"$1/g } ; $
+_ }
               split /~/ while <DATA>;
__DATA__
col1~col2~col3~col4~col5
data11~data12~data13~data14~da,data15
data21~"data22"~d"ata"23~data24~da"ta"25
data31~data32~data33~data34~"data35"
data,data41~data42~data43~data44~data45
data51,data52,data,junk,specialchar,sometingdata53~data54~data55

    [download]
    which gives:
    col1,col2,col3,col4,col5
data11,data12,data13,data14,"da,data15"
data21,"""data22""","d""ata""23",data24,"da""ta""25"
data31,data32,data33,data34,"""data35"""
"data,data41",data42,data43,data44,data45
"data51,data52,data,junk,specialchar,sometingdata53",data54,data55
    (the last item on each line has the line ending attached to it... so have to box a little clever to get the trailing '"' right in all cases. GrandFather used (.*), which won't match a line ending, unless you tell it to.)

    Or you can just stick '"' around every item:

    print join '",', map { s/(\A|"|\n)/"$1/g ; $_ } split /~/ while <DATA>
+;

    [download]
    which is slightly more straightforward:
    "col1","col2","col3","col4","col5"
"data11","data12","data13","data14","da,data15"
"data21","""data22""","d""ata""23","data24","da""ta""25"
"data31","data32","data33","data34","""data35"""
"data,data41","data42","data43","data44","data45"
"data51,data52,data,junk,specialchar,sometingdata53","data54","data55"

    One assumes that you don't expect your '~' item separators to appear in any item, not even within '"' or any other escaping mechanism... The deeper you go into this kind of thing, the more you find how useful stuff on CPAN is !

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Re^2: Workaround for my CSV file
by harishnuti (Beadle) on Dec 05, 2008 at 08:00 UTC

    Thank you Mr Grandfather, that was a good regular expression and solves current issues.. and indeed good learning for me. appreciate your time
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