Perl regular expression extract array elements

Question

I have a file with several rows of text. Each row contains a text array that is represented as follows

["ABC","D EF","XYZ"]
["MNO","P","QR  ST"]
["A"]
...

Notice, some of the words within quotes have spaces between them. I'm reading it into a perl script that looks like below

while(<stdin>){
  @tmp = split /,/, $_;
  ... do something with @tmp elements.
}

Is there an easy regex way to read all the elements into an array rather than painfully splitting it and stripping quotes and braces?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

It is simple to parse each row with a regular expression.

You don't say in what form you want to store the data, but this short program may help.

I have use Data::Dump to display the contents of the @data array after processing the file.

use strict;
use warnings;

my @data;

while (<DATA>) {
  my @fields = /"([^"]*)"/g;
  push @data, \@fields;
}

use Data::Dump;
dd \@data;

__DATA__
["ABC","D EF","XYZ"]
["MNO","P","QR  ST"]
["A"]

output

[["ABC", "D EF", "XYZ"], ["MNO", "P", "QR  ST"], ["A"]]

Answer 2

may be you better off with json parser? http://search.cpan.org/dist/JSON-Parse/lib/JSON/Parse.pod

Answer 3

Would something like this work?

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my @tmp;

while(<stdin>){
      chomp;
      s/[^a-zA-Z\d\s,]//g;
      push (@tmp, split /,/, $_);
}
print Dumper (\@tmp);

output

$VAR1 = [
          'ABC',
          'D EF',
          'XYZ',
          'MNO',
          'P',
          'QR  ST',
          'A'
        ];

Edit

Alternative:

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my @tmp;

while(<stdin>){
      chomp;
      s/[^a-zA-Z\d\s,]//g;
      push (@tmp, [split /,/, $_]);
}
print Dumper (\@tmp);

output

$VAR1 = [
          [
            'ABC',
            'D EF',
            'XYZ'
          ],
          [
            'MNO',
            'P',
            'QR  ST'
          ],
          [
            'A'
          ]
        ];