1Text::ParseWords(3)   User Contributed Perl Documentation  Text::ParseWords(3)
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NAME

6       Text::ParseWords - parse text into an array of tokens or array of
7       arrays
8

SYNOPSIS

10         use Text::ParseWords;
11         @lists = nested_quotewords($delim, $keep, @lines);
12         @words = quotewords($delim, $keep, @lines);
13         @words = shellwords(@lines);
14         @words = parse_line($delim, $keep, $line);
15         @words = old_shellwords(@lines); # DEPRECATED!
16

DESCRIPTION

18       The nested_quotewords() and quotewords() functions accept a delimiter
19       (which can be a regular expression) and a list of lines and then breaks
20       those lines up into a list of words ignoring delimiters that appear
21       inside quotes.  quotewords() returns all of the tokens in a single long
22       list, while nested_quotewords() returns a list of token lists
23       corresponding to the elements of @lines.  parse_line() does tokenizing
24       on a single string.  The *quotewords() functions simply call
25       parse_line(), so if you're only splitting one line you can call
26       parse_line() directly and save a function call.
27
28       The $keep controls what happens with delimters and special characters:
29
30       true
31           If true, then the tokens are split on the specified delimiter, but
32           all other characters (including quotes and backslashes) are kept in
33           the tokens.
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35       false
36           If $keep is false then the *quotewords() functions remove all
37           quotes and backslashes that are not themselves backslash-escaped or
38           inside of single quotes (i.e., quotewords() tries to interpret
39           these characters just like the Bourne shell).  NB: these semantics
40           are significantly different from the original version of this
41           module shipped with Perl 5.000 through 5.004.
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43       "delimiters"
44           As an additional feature, $keep may be the keyword "delimiters"
45           which causes the functions to preserve the delimiters in each
46           string as tokens in the token lists, in addition to preserving
47           quote and backslash characters.
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49       shellwords() is written as a special case of quotewords(), and it does
50       token parsing with whitespace as a delimiter-- similar to most Unix
51       shells.
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EXAMPLES

54       The sample program:
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56         use Text::ParseWords;
57         @words = quotewords('\s+', 0, q{this   is "a test" of\ quotewords \"for you});
58         $i = 0;
59         foreach (@words) {
60             print "$i: <$_>\n";
61             $i++;
62         }
63
64       produces:
65
66         0: <this>
67         1: <is>
68         2: <a test>
69         3: <of quotewords>
70         4: <"for>
71         5: <you>
72
73       demonstrating:
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75       0   a simple word
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77       1   multiple spaces are skipped because of our $delim
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79       2   use of quotes to include a space in a word
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81       3   use of a backslash to include a space in a word
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83       4   use of a backslash to remove the special meaning of a double-quote
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85       5   another simple word (note the lack of effect of the backslashed
86           double-quote)
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88       Replacing "quotewords('\s+', 0, q{this   is...})" with
89       "shellwords(q{this   is...})" is a simpler way to accomplish the same
90       thing.
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SEE ALSO

93       Text::CSV - for parsing CSV files
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AUTHORS

96       The original author is unknown, but presumably this evolved from
97       "shellwords.pl" in Perl 4.
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99       Much of the code for parse_line() (including the primary regexp) came
100       from Joerk Behrends <jbehrends@multimediaproduzenten.de>.
101
102       Examples section and other documentation provided by John Heidemann
103       <johnh@ISI.EDU>.
104
105       Hal Pomeranz <pomeranz@netcom.com> maintained this from 1994 through
106       1999, and did the first CPAN release.
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108       Alexandr Ciornii <alexchornyATgmail.com> maintained this from 2008 to
109       2015.
110
111       Many other people have contributed, with special thanks due to Michael
112       Schwern <schwern@envirolink.org> and Jeff Friedl
113       <jfriedl@yahoo-inc.com>.
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116       This library is free software; you may redistribute and/or modify it
117       under the same terms as Perl itself.
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121perl v5.36.0                      2023-01-20               Text::ParseWords(3)
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