From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2003-02-21T22:01:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Regexp help: Parsing a CSV file

irb(main):087:0* line='first, "se cond", third , four th'
"first, \"se cond\", third , four th"
irb(main):088:0> rx = /"[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[^,]+/
/"[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[^,]+/
irb(main):089:0> line.scan rx do |match| p match.strip end
"first"
"\"se cond\""
"third"
"four th"
"first, \"se cond\", third , four th"
irb(main):090:0>

    robert

"Tim Bates" <tim@bates.id.au> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:200302212243.48991.tim@bates.id.au...
> 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...
>
> Tim Bates
> --
> tim@bates.id.au
>