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

I am using split to separate array elements. The data looks like this:

1, 2, 3,"a,b,c","d", 4, ect...

I need it to be separated like this:

1

2

3

a,b,c

d

4

 I've tried  split /,\s+|,"/ but the results are inconsistent. I need use commas as the delimiter except when they are surrounds by quotes. Any ideas?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Incosistent delimeter
by toolic (Bishop) on Apr 21, 2011 at 01:48 UTC
    Text::CSV and similar offerings from CPAN were made to tackle this problem.
[reply]
Re: Incosistent delimeter
by trwww (Priest) on Apr 21, 2011 at 02:25 UTC 
    $ cat csv.pl 
use warnings;
use strict;
use Text::CSV;
use Data::Dumper;

my $data = q|1, 2, 3,"a,b,c","d", 4|;

my $csv = Text::CSV->new( {allow_whitespace => 1} );
$csv->parse($data);
my @data = $csv->fields;

print Dumper( \@data ), "\n";

$ perl csv.pl 
$VAR1 = [
          '1',
          '2',
          '3',
          'a,b,c',
          'd',
          '4'
        ];

    [download]

    Don't forget exception handling!

[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Inconsistent delimeter
by cmac (Monk) on Apr 21, 2011 at 02:30 UTC
    It's not clear what you want to do about spaces around commas. This strips spaces before and after commas: 
    $data = '1, 2, 3,"a,b,c","d", 4';
@a = $data =~ / *(".*?"|[^,]*?) *(?:,|$)/g;
pop @a;
for (@a) {s/^"(.+?)"$/$1/}
print join "\n", @a;

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

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