I'm not sure why you're promoting single delimiters into multiples of the same character. It seems to me that would make things more difficult rather than easier. You probably want to use something that's not in your data at all. I'm guessing you're wanting the '!' rather than the more usual '\' because you're wanting to avoid escaping your escape in Perl or because you're dealing with a data format that someone else already set.

Here's a quick poke at what you describe, although if you get any fancier than this you'd probably want to work on a real (if minimal) parser. 

while ( <> ) {
    chomp;
    s/!;/\x001/g;
    s/;/\x000/g;
    s/\x001/;/g;
    s/!!/!/g;
    @a = split /\x000/;
    print '{' . (join '}{', @a) . "}\n";
}
__END__
foo;bar;baz
fred!;flintstone;barney!!rubble
eggs!;spam!;toast!;spam;bacon!!;eggs!;spam!!toast!;spam;spamspam!!eggs
+!!;spam

[download]

Which prints: 

{foo}{bar}{baz}
{fred;flintstone}{barney!rubble}
{eggs;spam;toast;spam}{bacon!;eggs;spam!toast;spam}{spamspam!eggs!;spa
+m}

[download]

In reply to Re: split on delimiter unless escaped by mr_mischief
in thread split on delimiter unless escaped by yrp001

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