in reply to Re: split on comma-separated fields, where a field may have commas inside quotes
in thread split on comma-separated fields, where a field may have commas inside quotes
This sub-thread effectively underscores why it's such a Good Idea to use modules. There are numerous edge cases that make this a difficult problem. Chief among them: what about empty fields? Certainly they should be possible, so you can't just grep them out. But you don't want to introduce them, either.
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Then there's the issue about quoting quotes, which wasn't mentioned in this problem, but would probably come up eventually in any real-world case that gets used much. And reporting errors on malformed lines.
That said, I've got a regex that at least seems to deal with the empty fields properly:
/(?:^|,)((?:"[^"]*"|[^",]?)+)/g
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