extract string

[Bill McGonigle]

On Jan 11, 2006, at 08:42, klussier at comcast.net wrote:

> This poses an interesting problem. The "," is being used for two 
> purposes: a delimiter *AND* as a place holder.

I tried to prove to myself last night that this method would produce 
unresolvable ambiguities, but if you think like a state machine, 
character-by-character, it seems to work.

Now, for the Lazy, Perl regular expressions are a state machine of 
sorts.  I suspect you might be able to do the right thing with 
greedy/non-greedy matches.  Someone who lives and breathes regex might 
have a better handle on this.  It would take me two hours to get this 
one figured out.

This format sure makes the parser harder though, so if there's another 
way to get the data that's going to be desirable.  You can't use 
Text::CSV::Simple anymore, for instance, which gives you a 15-minute 
explicit reusable solution.

-Bill

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