You are right Sandman.
It does work for those two lines.
10 point for your clever solution for thsi specific case!
Of course it will split in only 4 fields, but that may well be desirable.
And of course it requires quoted fields 2 and 3, even if they are single words, but that is likely to be the case.
The reason I replied is because it did NOT work on the first line, on my test (XP system).
It turns out that when I copy that first line, it fails on the first instance, but works on the next! Bad luck?
I then tried the same on a Linux box (no access to hpux just now) and the same effect?!
First line fails, but an identical second line works.
I'm at a loss for an explanation.
For a more generic qoutes string handling I would probably turn to perl.
One approach would be to replace each quoted string with a recognizable word, then split and when you see a special word substitute the machting quoted string back:
----------- x.pl -------------
$special = "special";
print "Input #$NR $_";
$i = 0;
while (/\s(".*?")\s/) {
$special{$special.$i} = substr($1, 1, length($1) - 2);
s/$1/$special.$i++/e;
}
$j = 0;
foreach $word (split) {
$word = $special{$word} if ($word =~ /^$special/);
print ++$j, ": $word\n";
}
------------------------
use as: perl -n x.pl x.txt
Btw.. I only just noticed the new 'retain format' after I pushed 'submit'.
I'm going to use this re-reply to see how that would on my awk attempt.
Cheers,
Hein.
{
word_count=split ($0, words, " ");
n=1
for (i=1; i<=word_count; i++) {
word = words[i];
tokens[n]=word;
if (index(word,"\"")==1) {
# drop leading double-quote
word = substr (word,2);
tokens[n] = word;
while (index(word,"\"") != length(word)) {
word = words[++i];
tokens[n] = tokens[n] " " word; # single space.
}
# drop trailing quote
tokens[n] = substr (tokens[n], 1, length(tokens[n]) - 1);
}
n++;
}
#
# Finally we have all new tokens
#
print "\nInput #",NR, $0;
for (i=1; i print i, tokens[i];
}
}
