Question

I’m trying to create two a regex to add quotes to some values in a string. Basically the string would be like this:

999            date               Doe, John E.              London            123456789

And I want to surround the name so that if this file is exported to a csv, it won’t be separated. This is what I have so far

$line =~ s/([^\s{2,}]*,[^\s{2,}]*)/"$1"/g;

I think it should find any comma and anything near it until it finds two or more spaces but it’s not working. Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

You asked for anything except 2 or more spaces.

I agree that unpack is the more natural way to do this. But split is a way to use a cookie-cutter in the shape of a pattern. Anything not in that pattern is a return field. So this:

@fields = split /\h{2,}/, $line;
$line = join(" " x 2 => map { "($_)" } @fields);

might be enough.