Delimiter delimma

[new2unix]

Hi,

Have a source file containing this following sample text:

ID|PATTERN1|USER1
ID|PATTERN1\|PATTERN2|USER2
ID|PATTERN1\|PATTERN2\|PATTERN3|USER3
ID|PATTERN4|USER1
.....
.....

Each line actually has only 3 fiedls delimited by "|". But the problem is the possible combination of "\|" that may occur inside the second field. Not sure how I might use the split or other function to deal with the "\|" to split the data into:

$field1 = text in ID field
$field2 = text representing PATTERN1\|PATTERN2\|.... etc
$field3 = text in USER field


Thanks,

Mike

 

[theSeeker03]

use split function.

then, loop through the results and if an element has "\" as its last character, join it with the next element of the array.

 

[rosenk]

You can just do it with split, in fact.

@fields = split /(?<!\\)\|/, $line;

That regex matches any | character that is not preceded by a \.