Hi all,
I am writing a perl script to parse a file. The data in the file is
seperated by space/tab. However, certain fields may be empty or
consist of mutiple words and are double quoted and this makes it
difficut for me to do a split.
Example of data:
"" "This is 2nd field"
3 4
1 2
"" 4
1 2 "The field may consist of (meta)
characters" ""
What I am doing is as such:
while ($line=~/(".*?")/) {; <- Loops until all double-
quoted string is replaced
$line=~s/""/__EMPTY__/g;
$tmp1=$1;
$tmp2=$1;
$tmp1=~s/"//g;
$tmp1=~s/ /__SPACE__/g;
$tmp2=~s/([\(\)])/\\$1/g;
$line=~s/$tmp2/$tmp1/; <- needs to replace meta-
characters in $tmp2
}
@tmp=split /\s+/, $line;
foreach $i (0..$#tmp) {
$tmp[$i]=~s/__SPACE__/ /g;
$tmp[$i]=~s/__EMPTY__//g;
// Store data
}
Substitue "" with __EMPTY__
While line matches ".*?" (non-greedy match), remember the content
between the quotes.
Assign this content to $tmp1 and $tmp2. Remove " from $tmp1, Replace '
' with __SPACE__.
Replace metacharacters of $tmp2 with escape, ie (meta) to \(meta\).
Substition of $tmp2 with $tmp1 (non-global).
Do a split /\s+/,
Replace __EMPTY__ with empty string
Replace __SPACE__ with " ".
Does you one have a neater and more efficient way either by split of
regexp?
Thanks
Shu Teng
