From: Andrew Stewart <boss@...>
Date: 2008-03-20T19:33:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Split string at spaces, but not when inside quotation marks?


On 19 Mar 2008, at 10:26, Sebastian Hungerecker wrote:
> Peter Bunyan wrote:
>> Is there already a built-in method to do this
>
> require 'shellwords'
> Shellwords.shellwords 'Hello "wo rld" how "are \" you today"'
> => ["Hello", "wo rld", "how", "are \" you today"]

Or you can pretend it's CSV:

$ irb
 >> require 'csv'
=> true
 >> s = 'the "quick brown" fox jumped "over a lazy" dog'
=> "the "quick brown" fox jumped "over a lazy" dog"
 >> CSV.parse_line s, ' '
=> ["the", "quick brown", "fox", "jumped", "over a lazy", "dog"]

Unfortunately it doesn't handle the pesky backslash in Sebastian's  
example above.

 >> s = 'Hello "wo rld" how "are \" you today"'
=> "Hello "wo rld" how "are \\" you today""
 >> CSV.parse_line s, ' '
=> []

Oh well!

Cheers,
Andy

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