CSV says that embedded quotes should be doubled in the CSV field. To see Text::CSV's notion of that,

$ perl -MText::CSV -e'$c = Text::CSV->new(); $c->combine qw/Crosby
 Stills Nash/, q/and sometimes "Young"/; print $c->string, $/'
"Crosby","Stills","Nash","and sometimes ""Young"""
$
[download]

Check Anydata::Format::CSV if you cannot get your data in Text::CSV's preferred format. It allows you to construct a parser with your choices for 'field_sep', 'quote', 'escape', and 'record_sep'. That may not fix all your problems if the app has a plain inadequate notion of CSV, but it might work.

After Compline,
Zaxo

Building on what Zaxo said about correct CSV quoting of double-quotes, you might as well filter the CSV-file before you process it with Text::CSV.
the following regex, using zero-width look-ahead/-behind assertions, works quite well (with one flaw):

(?<![,])"(?![,])
[download]

A little test:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
my $test = '""crosby"","stills","nash","and sometimes "young""';
$test =~ s/(?<![,])"(?![,])/""/g;
print $test, "\n";
$test = '"som"ething","sil"ly","quo"ted"';
$test =~ s/(?<![,])"(?![,])/""/g;
print $test, "\n";
__END__
""""crosby""","stills","nash","and sometimes ""young""""
""som""ething","sil""ly","quo""ted""
[download]

The flaw, as you might've already seen, is that the look-ahead/behind assertions recognize the start and end of the line as 'not comma', and therefore substitute the leading and the tailing double-quote too. If your data is otherwise well-formed, all you have to do, is add a second filter:

$test =~ s/^"(.*)"$/$1/g;
[download]

regards,
tomte

---

Hlade's Law:

If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person --
they will find an easier way to do it.

If your trying to escape the embedded quotes before passing it to Text::CSV, then this might do the trick.

Note: I've added some extra embedded quotes to check that it doesn't escaped already escaped quotes and handles the edge cases at either end of the string. You'll need to throw a few more tests at this before using it in anger.

$s='"crosby","stills","nash",""and" ""sometimes"" "young""'

# capture everything between a quote and a quote 
# follow by a comma or the end of string
 $s =~ s[ " (.*?) " ( , | $ ) ]
 { 
     # Look for unescaped embedded quotes and escape them
     (my $t = $1) =~ s[ (?<!") " (?!") ][""]gx; 
     
     # put back the outer quotes and the comma if there was one
     '"' . $t . '"' . ($2||''); 
 }gex;

print $s;
"crosby","stills","nash","""and"" ""sometimes"" ""young"""
[download]

This assumes that $s would otherwise be parsed correctly by Text::CSV.

--

flounder

I felt kind of bad just giving an opinion and not a useful suggestion so here is my suggestion:

use strict;
my $val = '"crosby","stills","nash","and sometimes "young""';
print join "\n", split /(?<="),(?=")/, $val;

__OUTPUT__
"crosby"
"stills"
"nash"
"and sometimes "young""
[download]

This works if you know you know your fields will always be surrounded by double quotes and there will be no spaces arround the comma. The spaces could be taken care of by using the regex /(?<=")\s*,\s*(?=")/.

--

flounder

Nope, by any number, I meant 0 or more, as several of the fields come back like "bono","the edge","","larry mullen, jr."

No, I'm not making a music database, just spitting out example values as they occurr to me.

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new( );
[download]

I have parsed and output nastier data than you have described here with this module. All escaping handled by the module.