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

I searched CPAN and couldn't find anything helpful (or at least that I could tell was helpful), so here goes:

I need to split a string based on commas, except if the comma is inside a parenthesis.

"a,b,c" => ("a","b","c")
"a,(b,c)" => ("a","(b,c)"
"a,A(b,(c,d))" => ("a","A(b,(d,c))"


Thanks!
  • Comment on Splitting a string while respecting parentheses

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Re: Splitting a string while respecting parentheses
by ccn (Vicar) on Dec 05, 2008 at 23:28 UTC
[reply]
Re: Splitting a string while respecting parentheses
by graff (Chancellor) on Dec 06, 2008 at 03:09 UTC
    Doing a proper job of rolling your own calls for character-by-character parsing. Parse::RecDescent is a worthwhile tool to learn, but if you'll never get more complicated than the OP task, this would probably suffice: 
    use strict;
while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my $nested = 0;
    my @out = ();
    my $tkn = '';
    for my $c ( split // ) {
        if ( $c eq '(' ) {
            $nested++;
            $tkn .= $c;
        }
        elsif ( $c eq ')' ) {
            if ( $nested ) {
                $nested--;
            } else {
                warn "unmatched ')' in $_\n";
            }
            $tkn .= $c;
        }
        elsif ( $nested or $c ne ',' ) {
            $tkn .= $c;
        }
        elsif ( $tkn ) {
            push @out, $tkn;
            $tkn = '';
        }
    }
    if ( $nested ) {
        warn "$nested unmatched '(' in $_\n";
    } else {
        push @out, $tkn if ( $tkn );
    }
    print join( " ;; ", @out ), "\n" if ( @out );
}

__DATA__
a,b,c,d
x,z,
a,(b,c(d,e)f)),h
(1,2)(345)
,(6,7),(789)
((345,6),567
,,m,,n,,(o,,p),,q,,

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[d/l]
      Thanks, this is the road I'll go down.
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