man > Text::ParseWords

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 - 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 AT multimediaproduzenten.de>.

    Examples section and other documentation provided by John Heidemann <johnh AT ISI.EDU>.

    Hal Pomeranz <pomeranz AT 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 AT envirolink.org> and Jeff Friedl <jfriedl AT 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.