#!/usr/bin/perl -w

    use strict;


    my $str = 'ABC"123"XYZ';

    my @p   = split /("[^"]+")/, $str;

    foreach my $part (@p) {
        print "part = ($part)\n";
    }

    __END__
    Prints:

    part = (ABC)
    part = ("123")
    part = (XYZ)
[download]

--
John.

That's an interesting technique.

The split() call normally captures everything that doesn't match the regex; in this case, it's the unquoted parts. You add on a capture in the regex, which tells split to also keep the separators; in this case, it's the quoted parts. The non-obvious part is that split will interleave the captures-in-separators and the usual non-separator portions properly.

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

Yes, it is one of the many interesting features of split, from the pod:

    If the PATTERN contains parentheses, additional
    list elements are created from each matching
    substring in the delimiter.

        split(/([,-])/, "1-10,20", 3);

    produces the list value

        (1, '-', 10, ',', 20)
[download]

Other interesting features of split are LIMIT, negative LIMIT, the parameter-less split, the difference between ' ', / / and /\s+/ and the implicit split to @_ when not in a list context (which is very useful in Golf).

I used one of these features in Strip leading and trailing whitespace from a string..

--
John.

Part of your RE was a lookbehind to see that you weren't preceeded by \".*\". Finding that might take searching back 5 characters or 50. Getting that logic right is hard, and it has never been implemented in Perl. Therefore you can only do a lookbehind when Perl can figure out exactly how many characters back it has to go.

(Just to annoy people, Java has no such limit.)

my $str = "ABC\"123\"XYZ";
$str =~ /([A-Z]*)"([0-9]*)"([A-Z]*)/;
print "Res: $1 $2 $3\n"

__DATA__

Res: ABC 123 XYZ
[download]

      
--------------------------------
SV* sv_bless(SV* sv, HV* stash);

This is update my previous post!


my $str = "ABC\"123\"XYZ";

map { print $_ . "\n" } split('"', $str);

__DATA__

ABC
123
XYZ
[download]

      
--------------------------------
SV* sv_bless(SV* sv, HV* stash);