I'm writing a parser for a specified format (so I'm stuck with the format). I have no doubt this will lead to many questions, but here's my first:

Given a string of comma separated elements, where an element can contain a function, and functions can have commas in their arguments, how do I best grab the elements?

After looking over Merlyn's nested C comment parser and The CSV parser from Mastering Regex, I have a working solution. I'm not convinced, however, that this is the easiest/best way to do it. Comments?

#!/usr/bin/perl

$teststr="blah,blah(blah,blah(blah,blah(blah))),blah";

#This is three elements: 
# blah
# blah(blah,blah(blah,blah(blah)))
# blah
# I don't have to worry about escaped parens, the file format forbids 
+it.

foreach (&parse_comma($teststr)){
  print "$_\n";   #This just proves that it works
}

sub parse_comma{ 
  my $commastr=shift;
  my @tags;
  my $count=0;
  my $carrystr="";

  foreach (split(/,/, $commastr)){
    $_=$carrystr.",".$_ if $carrystr;
    $count=s/\(/(/g;
    $count-=s/\)/)/g;
    if($count){
      $carrystr=$_;
    }else{
      $carrystr="";
      push @tags, $_;
    }
  }
  return @tags;
}
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