From: Xavier Noria <fxn@...>
Date: 2006-01-07T11:17:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Splitting strings on spaces, unless inside quotes

On Jan 7, 2006, at 1:08, Richard Livsey wrote:

> I want to split a string into words, but group quoted words  
> together such that...
>
> some words "some quoted text" some more words
>
> would get split up into:
>
> ["some", "words", "some quoted text", "some", "more", "words"]

Curiously, someone asked exactly that on freenode#perl tonight.

If the input is that simple and is assumed to be well-formed this is  
enough:

irb(main):005:0> %q{some words "some quoted text" some "" more  
words}.scan(/"[^"]*"|\S+/)
=> ["some", "words", "\"some quoted text\"", "some", "\"\"", "more",  
"words"]

Since nothing was said about this, it does not handle escaped quotes,  
and it assumes quotes are always balanced, so a field cannot be %q 
{"foo}, for example.

-- fxn