String to split a complicated string in Perl

Question

I have a string that looks something like this:

'som,ething', another, 'thin#'g', 'her,e', gggh*

I am trying to get it to split on the commas that are NOT in the elements, like this:

'som,ething'
another
'thin#'g'
'her,e'
gggh*

I am using parse_line(q{,}, 1, $string) but it seems to fail when the string has single quotes in it. Is there something I'm missing?

@vks This is NOT a duplicate. First of all, the question is for Perl, second of all the question states that the single quotes within the string are the issue - not the commas. — werhgvfwe5r, Aug 26 '15 at 11:47
Do you actually have mismatched quotes - `'thin'g',` - that makes the problem considerably harder (how would you tell which field the following comma belongs to?) — Sobrique, Aug 26 '15 at 12:04
@werhgvfwe5r, all you really need is the regexp from linked question. The Perl wrapper around it is absolutely trivial. — Oleg V. Volkov, Aug 26 '15 at 12:28
@Sobrique, yes, sadly the quotes are mismatched. However, I made a small mistake in my original question. The quotes that are in quotes are usually escaped with a special character (`#`). Updating the question — werhgvfwe5r, Aug 26 '15 at 12:48

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 26 '15 at 12:08

1

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $string = q{'som,ething', another, 'thin'g', 'her,e', gggh*};
my @splitted = split(/,(?=\s+)/, $string);
print $_."\n" foreach @splitted;

Output:

'som,ething'
 another
 'thin'g'
 'her,e'
 gggh*

Demo

answered Aug 26 '15 at 12:08

Chankey Pathak

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Uh, while it "works" with this particular string, it obviously doesn't match task described in question: `q{'som , ething', another, 'thin'g', 'her,e', gggh*}` = fail. – Oleg V. Volkov Aug 26 '15 at 12:31
Forgot to mention that inner quotes are escaped by a hash (`#`). I assume that might make things easier. – werhgvfwe5r Aug 26 '15 at 12:49
This solution also assumes that the commas are all followed by a space. It's possible there is none: `a word,'another',field, here` – werhgvfwe5r Aug 26 '15 at 12:51

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

0

It looks like you're trying to parse comma-separated values. The answer is to use Text::CSV_XS since that handles the various weird cases you're likely to find in the data. See How can I parse quoted CSV in Perl with a regex?

edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

Community

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1

answered Aug 26 '15 at 13:51

brian d foy

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Casimir et Hippolyte · Answer 3 · 2015-08-26T13:33:06.740

-1

Using split is not the way to go. If you are sure your string is well formatted using a global match is more simple, example:

my $line = "'som,ething', another , 'thin#'g', 'her,e' , gggh*";

my @list = $line =~ /\s*('[^#']*(?:#.[^#']*)*+'|[^,]+(?<=\S))\s*/g;

print join("|", @list);

(the (?<=\S) is only here to trim items on the right)

edited Aug 26 '15 at 13:33

answered Aug 26 '15 at 13:18

Casimir et Hippolyte

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String to split a complicated string in Perl

3 Answers3