Question

I’m writing a command line interpreter but i’m blank on this type of input:

command -text "hello this is "some text" with "quotes inside"" -other "another thing""" -another " -another "text"

I need to escape the quotes and then input the string into my parser.
What i thought:

/".+"/ but it takes everything from the first quote.

Do you have any insights?

EDIT:
What i want:

input: command -text "hello this is "some text" with "quotes inside"" -other "another thing""" -another " -another "text"

output: command -text "hello this is \"some text\" with \"quotes inside\"" -other "another thing\"\"" -another " -another \"text"

Answer 1

Well, I have a VERY ugly solution… It handles everything but dashes within strings.

Hope your eyes don’t get hurt…

fg@erwin ~ $ perl -ne 'my @l; foreach (split /-/) { my ($start, $middle, $end) = m/^([^"]+)"(.*)"([^"]*)$/ or do { push @l, $_; next; }; $middle =~ s/"/\\"/g;push @l, "$start\"$middle\"$end"; } END { print join("-", @l) . "\n";}' <<EOF
> command -text "hello this is "some text" with "quotes inside"" -other "another thing""" -another " -another "text"
> EOF
command -text "hello this is \"some text\" with \"quotes inside\"" -other "another thing\"\"" -another " -another "text"

Explaining it a little…

my @l;  # declare a new list l, which will contain the "transformed" strings
foreach (split /-/) {  # split against the dash -- no loop variable: $_ has the content
    # Try and capture in start, middle and end:
    # * start: from the beginning until the first quote;
    # * middle: everything but the last quote and whatever is after it;
    # * end: what is after the last quote
    # By default, m// applies to $_
    my ($start, $middle, $end) = m/^([^"]+)"(.*)"([^"]*)$/
        or do { # if no match...
            push @l, $_;  # put the line as is,
            next;         # and continue
        };
    $middle =~ s/"/\\"/g; # in the middle part, precede all quotes with a \
    push @l, "$start\"$middle\"$end"; # and push the final string onto the list
}

# finally, print all transformed lines joined with a dash, plus a newline
END { print join("-", @l) . "\n";}