Take the example case of trying to split a string that is comma-separated into its different fields. (We'll pretend you said comma-separated, not comma-delimited, which is different and almost never what you mean.) You can't use split(/,/) because you shouldn't split if the comma is inside quotes. For example, take a data line like this:
SAR001,"","Cimetrix, Inc","Bob Smith","CAM",N,8,1,0,7,"Error, Core Dumped"Due to the restriction of the quotes, this is a fairly complex problem. Thankfully, we have Jeffrey Friedl, author of a highly recommended book on regular expressions, to handle these for us. He suggests (assuming your string is contained in $text):
@new = ();
push(@new, $+) while $text =~ m{
"([^\"\\]*(?:\\.[^\"\\]*)*)",? # groups the phrase inside the quotes
| ([^,]+),?
| ,
}gx;
push(@new, undef) if substr($text,-1,1) eq ',';If you want to represent quotation marks inside a
quotation-mark-delimited field, escape them with backslashes (eg,
"like \"this\"". Unescaping them is a task addressed earlier in
this section.
Alternatively, the Text::ParseWords module (part of the standard Perl distribution) lets you say:
use Text::ParseWords;
@new = quotewords(",", 0, $text);There's also a Text::CSV (Comma-Separated Values) module on CPAN.