Text/ParseWords

Section: Perl Programmers Reference Guide (3)
Updated: perl 5.003 with
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NAME

Text::ParseWords - parse text into an array of tokens

SYNOPSIS

  use Text::ParseWords;
  @words = &quotewords($delim, $keep, @lines);
  @words = &shellwords(@lines);
  @words = &old_shellwords(@lines);

DESCRIPTION

&quotewords() accepts 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.

The $keep argument is a boolean flag. If true, the quotes are kept with each word, otherwise quotes are stripped in the splitting process. $keep also defines whether unprotected backslashes are retained.

A &shellwords() replacement is included to demonstrate the new package. This version differs from the original in that it will _NOT_ default to using $_ if no arguments are given. I personally find the old behavior to be a mis-feature.

&quotewords() works by simply jamming all of @lines into a single string in $_ and then pulling off words a bit at a time until $_ is exhausted.

AUTHORS

Hal Pomeranz (pomeranz@netcom.com), 23 March 1994

Basically an update and generalization of the old shellwords.pl. Much code shamelessly stolen from the old version (author unknown).

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 15:34:43 GMT, January 15, 2023