parsing a search string

treating stuff in quote marks as one word

[basenotes]

Is there a preferred way of doing this?

At the moment, I'm splitting the string into words, then going through each word one by one.

If the word starts with a quote mark, add it to the next word until it finds a word ending in a quote mark.

Is there a better way?

Thanks

[perl_diver]

the question is really too vague to answer, post some sample data you are searching and the code you are currently using and the results you are trying to achieve.

[basenotes]

sorry, I'll try to be more concise.

If I have a search string, such as:

decorated "blue widgets" "red widgets" sandy leaf.

What is the best way of splitting that string up, so that I have an array with the following data:

- decorated
- blue widgets
- red widgets
- sandy
- leaf

currently, I'm splitting the string with split(/ /) to get the individual words, then piecing together the quoted words

cheers

[perl_diver]

maybe there is a better way, but here is one way:

my $var = qq~decorated "blue widgets" "red widgets" sandy leaf.~; 
$var =~ s/("[^\"]*")/unspacify($1)/ge; 
my @array = split(/\s+/,$var); 
s/\^//g for @array; 
print map{"$_\n"} @array; 
sub unspacify { 
  #replaces spaces within quoted words with ^ 
  my $string = shift; 
  $string =~ s/\s/\^/g; 
  return($string); 
} 

[basenotes]

thank you

[Brett_Tabke]

Then if you want to get fancy - add +- altavista syntax...