The Perl Toolchain Summit needs more sponsors. If your company depends on Perl, please support this very important event.

NAME

Win32::ParseWords - Parse a Win32 commandline

DESCRIPTION

This module has been copied almost verbatim from Text::ParseWords. Only the quote character \ has been replaced by ^

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 argument is a boolean flag. If true, then the tokens are split on the specified delimiter, but all other characters (including quotes and backslashes) are kept in the tokens. 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. 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>           -- a simple word
  1: <is>             -- multiple spaces are skipped because of our $delim
  2: <a test>         -- use of quotes to include a space in a word
  3: <of quotewords>  -- use of a ^ to include a space in a word
  4: <"for>           -- use of a ^ to remove the special meaning of a double-quote
  5: <you>            -- another simple word (note the lack of effect of ^")

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

AUTHOR

Klaus Eichner <klaus03@gmail.com>

This module has been copied almost verbatim from the original module Text::ParseWords. Only the quote character \ has been replaced by ^

Maintainer of the original module: Alexandr Ciornii <alexchornyATgmail.com>.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2016 by Klaus Eichner

This module has been copied almost verbatim from Text::ParseWords. Only the quote character \ has been replaced by ^

All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the artistic license 2.0, see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license-2.0.php