Question

I’m seeking a solution to splitting a string which contains text in the following format:

"abcd efgh 'ijklm no pqrs' tuv"

which will produce the following results:

['abcd', 'efgh', 'ijklm no pqrs', 'tuv']

In other words, it splits by whitespace unless inside of a single quoted string. I think it could be done with .NET regexps using “Lookaround” operators, particularly balancing operators. I’m not so sure about Perl.

Answer 1

Use Text::ParseWords:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; use warnings;
use Text::ParseWords;

my @words = parse_line('\s+', 0, "abcd efgh 'ijklm no pqrs' tuv");

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper \@words;

Output:

C:\Temp> ff
$VAR1 = [
          'abcd',
          'efgh',
          'ijklm no pqrs',
          'tuv'
        ];

You can look at the source code for Text::ParseWords::parse_line to see the pattern used.