From: William James <w_a_x_man@...>
Date: 2006-01-10T04:23:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Splitting strings on spaces, unless inside quotes

Geoff Jacobsen wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 18:13 +0900, William James wrote:
> > 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"]
> >
> > s = 'some words "some quoted text" some more words'
> > p s.split( / *"(.*?)" *| / )
> >
>
> Which along with the CSV solution can't handle complex cases:
>
>  s='one two"  "\'with quotes\' "three "'
>
>  s.split( / *"(.*?)" *| / )
>  => ["one", "two", "  ", "'with", "quotes'", "three "]
>
>  require 'csv'
>  CSV::parse_line(s)
>  => []
>
> but Shellwords can:
>
>  require 'shellwords'
>  Shellwords.shellwords(s)
>  => ["one", "two  with quotes", "three "]

This is not a "more complex case"; it is an invalid case.
The original poster simply wanted to avoid splitting on spaces
within double quotes, not within single quotes.

The shellwords "solution" is a solution to a different problem, not
to this one.  It can't even handle a simple case:

require 'shellwords'
s = "why can't you think?"
Shellwords.shellwords(s)

ArgumentError: Unmatched single quote: 't you think?