Regex Group in Perl: how to capture elements into array from regex group that matches unknown number of/multiple/variable occurrences from a string?

Question

In Perl, how can I use one regex grouping to capture more than one occurrence that matches it, into several array elements?

For example, for a string:

Answer 1

You asked for a RegEx solution or other code. Here is a (mostly) non regex solution using only core modules. The only regex is \s+ to determine the delimiter; in this case one or more spaces.

use strict; use warnings;
use Text::ParseWords;
my $string="var1=100 var2=90 var5=hello var3=\"a, b, c\" var7=test var3=hello";  

my @array = quotewords('\s+', 0, $string);

for ( my $i = 0; $i < scalar( @array ); $i++ )
{
    print $i.": ".$array[$i]."\n";
}

Or you can execute the code HERE

The output is:

0: var1=100
1: var2=90
2: var5=hello
3: var3=a, b, c
4: var7=test
5: var3=hello

If you really want a regex solution, Alan Moore's comment linking to his code on IDEone is the gas!

Answer 2

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; use warnings;

use Text::ParseWords;
use YAML;

my $string =
    "var1=100 var2=90 var5=hello var3=\"a, b, c\" var7=test var3=hello";

my @parts = shellwords $string;
print Dump \@parts;

@parts = map { { split /=/ } } @parts;

print Dump \@parts;

Answer 3

This one will provide you also common escaping in double-quotes as for example var3="a, \"b, c".

@a = /(\w+=(?:\w+|"(?:[^\\"]*(?:\\.[^\\"]*)*)*"))/g;

In action:

echo 'var1=100 var2=90 var42="foo\"bar\\" var5=hello var3="a, b, c" var7=test var3=hello' |
perl -nle '@a = /(\w+=(?:\w+|"(?:[^\\"]*(?:\\.[^\\"]*)*)*"))/g; $,=","; print @a'
var1=100,var2=90,var42="foo\"bar\\",var5=hello,var3="a, b, c",var7=test,var3=hello