How can I split a string by whitespace unless inside of a single quoted string?

Question

I'm seeking a solution to splitting a string which contains text in the following format:

"abcd efgh 'ijklm no pqrs' tuv"

which will produce the following results:

['abcd', 'efgh', 'ijklm no pqrs', 'tuv']

In other words, it splits by whitespace unless inside of a single quoted string. I think it could be done with .NET regexps using "Lookaround" operators, particularly balancing operators. I'm not so sure about Perl.

Answer 1

Use Text::ParseWords:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; use warnings;
use Text::ParseWords;

my @words = parse_line('\s+', 0, "abcd efgh 'ijklm no pqrs' tuv");

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper \@words;

Output:

C:\Temp> ff
$VAR1 = [
          'abcd',
          'efgh',
          'ijklm no pqrs',
          'tuv'
        ];

You can look at the source code for Text::ParseWords::parse_line to see the pattern used.

Answer 2

use strict; use warnings;

my $text = "abcd efgh 'ijklm no pqrs' tuv 'xwyz 1234 9999' 'blah'";
my @out;

my @parts = split /'/, $text;

for ( my $i = 1; $i < $#parts; $i += 2 ) {
    push @out, split( /\s+/, $parts[$i - 1] ), $parts[$i];
}

push @out, $parts[-1];

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper \@out;