From: Christian Rishoj <di020754@...>
Date: 2003-02-21T21:41:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Regexp help: Parsing a CSV file

On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Tim Bates wrote:

> I've dumped a CSV (comma separated values) file from Excel, and I want to
> parse it into cels within my Ruby script. Easy enough, you say:
>   line.split(',')
> But it's a little more complicated than that - see, if the cel has a comma in
> it, it gets surrounded in quotes. If a cel has a quote in it, it's surrounded
> by quotes and doubled, eg:
>   Test	Te,st		Te"st
> becomes
>   Test,"Te,st","Te""st"
> Now to use String#split, I would have to write a regexp that will match a
> comma, provided that comma is preceeded by an even number of quotes. BUT, I
> don't want the regexp to match the quotes themselves, just the comma. I can't
> figure this one out...


line.split(',').collect do |e|
  if e[0] == '"' && e[e.length - 1] == '"'
    e[1...e.length].gsub('""', '"')
  else
    e
  end
end


- Christian