[Dev] perl: how to parse quoted comma separated values?

[Jeremy P]

On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, Dana Smith wrote:

> 2) On google I found Text::CSV

Thanks for the tip (thanks to Greg too).  This is what I ended up using...
it's really quite a simple module and works well for my purpose.

> 3) The book "Mastering Regular Expressions" contains this magic:
> 
> sub parse_csv {
>    my $text = shift;      # record containing comma-separated values
>    my @new  = ();
> 
>    # the first part groups the phrase inside the quotes.
>    # see explanation of this pattern in MRE
>    push(@new, $+) while $text =~ m{"([^\"\\]*(?:\\.[^\"\\]*)*)",? |  ([^,]+),? | ,}gx;
>    push(@new, undef) if substr($text, -1,1) eq ',';
>    return @new;      # list of values that were comma-separated

Ugh.  I promise I'm not really "afraid" of regular expressions, but it
stuff like this sure is hard to read!  

--Jeremy