Text::ParseWords(3pm) Perl Programmers Reference Guide Text::ParseWords(3pm)
NAME
Text::ParseWords - parse text into an array of tokens or array of
arrays
SYNOPSIS
use Text::ParseWords;
@lists = nested_quotewords($delim, $keep, @lines);
@words = quotewords($delim, $keep, @lines);
@words = shellwords(@lines);
@words = parse_line($delim, $keep, $line);
@words = old_shellwords(@lines); # DEPRECATED!
DESCRIPTION
The nested_quotewords() and quotewords() functions accept a delimiter
(which can be a regular expression) and a list of lines and then breaks
those lines up into a list of words ignoring delimiters that appear
inside quotes. quotewords() returns all of the tokens in a single long
list, while nested_quotewords() returns a list of token lists
corresponding to the elements of @lines. parse_line() does tokenizing
on a single string. The *quotewords() functions simply call
parse_line(), so if you're only splitting one line you can call
parse_line() directly and save a function call.
The $keep controls what happens with delimters and special characters:
true
If true, then the tokens are split on the specified delimiter, but
all other characters (including quotes and backslashes) are kept in
the tokens.
false
If $keep is false then the *quotewords() functions remove all
quotes and backslashes that are not themselves backslash-escaped or
inside of single quotes (i.e., quotewords() tries to interpret
these characters just like the Bourne shell). NB: these semantics
are significantly different from the original version of this
module shipped with Perl 5.000 through 5.004.
"delimiters"
As an additional feature, $keep may be the keyword "delimiters"
which causes the functions to preserve the delimiters in each
string as tokens in the token lists, in addition to preserving
quote and backslash characters.
shellwords() is written as a special case of quotewords(), and it does
token parsing with whitespace as a delimiter-- similar to most Unix
shells.
EXAMPLES
The sample program:
use Text::ParseWords;
@words = quotewords('\s+', 0, q{this is "a test" of\ quotewords \"for you});
$i = 0;
foreach (@words) {
print "$i: <$_>\n";
$i++;
}
produces:
0: <this>
1: <is>
2: <a test>
3: <of quotewords>
4: <"for>
5: <you>
demonstrating:
0 a simple word
1 multiple spaces are skipped because of our $delim
2 use of quotes to include a space in a word
3 use of a backslash to include a space in a word
4 use of a backslash to remove the special meaning of a double-quote
5 another simple word (note the lack of effect of the backslashed
double-quote)
Replacing "quotewords('\s+', 0, q{this is...})" with
"shellwords(q{this is...})" is a simpler way to accomplish the same
thing.
SEE ALSO
Text::CSV(3) - for parsing CSV files
AUTHORS
The original author is unknown, but presumably this evolved from
"shellwords.pl" in Perl 4.
Much of the code for parse_line() (including the primary regexp) came
from Joerk Behrends <jbehrends@multimediaproduzenten.de>.
Examples section and other documentation provided by John Heidemann
<johnh@ISI.EDU>.
Hal Pomeranz <pomeranz@netcom.com> maintained this from 1994 through
1999, and did the first CPAN release.
Alexandr Ciornii <alexchornyATgmail.com> maintained this from 2008 to
2015.
Many other people have contributed, with special thanks due to Michael
Schwern <schwern@envirolink.org> and Jeff Friedl
<jfriedl@yahoo-inc.com>.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
This library is free software; you may redistribute and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
perl v5.38.2 2023-11-28 Text::ParseWords(3pm)
perl 5.38.2 - Generated Sat Dec 14 08:37:04 CST 2024