From: Geoff Jacobsen <geoffjacobsen@...>
Date: 2006-01-10T10:50:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Splitting strings on spaces, unless inside quotes

On Tue, 2006-01-10 at 04:23 +0900, William James wrote:
> 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 "]
...
> > 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?
> 

I agree my example doesn't match the originators request but *I think*
there is enough ambiguity about the post to postulate that they may want
more real-world cases such as:

s='symbol "William said: \"why can't you think?\"" 123 "<xml>foo</xml>"'
Shellwords.shellwords(s)

=> ["symbol", "William said: \"why can't you think?\"", "123",
"<xml>foo</xml>"]

So Shellwords may indeed be a solution to this problem but the problem
is not stated precisely enough to know.