How to skip splitting for some part of the line - perl

Question

Say I have a line lead=george wife=jane "his boy"=elroy. I want to split with space but that does not include the "his boy" part. I should be considered as one.
With normal split it is also splitting "his boy" like taking "his" as one and "boy" as second part. How to escape this
Following this i tried
split " ", $_
Just came to know that this will work
use strict; use warnings;
my $string = q(hi my name is 'john doe');
my #parts = $string =~ /'.*?'|\S+/g;
print map { "$_\n" } #parts;
But it does not looks good. Any other simple thing with split itself?

Answer 1

You could use Text::ParseWords for this
use Text::ParseWords;
$list = "lead=george wife=jane \"his boy\"=elroy";
#words = quotewords('\s+', 0, $list);
$i = 0;
foreach (#words) {
print "$i: <$_>\n";
$i++;
}
ouput:
0: <lead=george>
1: <wife=jane>
2: <his boy=elroy>

Answer 2

sub split_space {
my ( $text ) = #_;
while (
$text =~ m/
( # group ($1)
\"([^\"]+)\" # first try find something in quotes ($2)
|
(\S+?) # else minimal non-whitespace run ($3)
)
=
(\S+) # then maximum non-whitespace run ($4)
/xg
) {
my $key = defined($2) ? $2 : $3;
my $value = $4;
print( "key=$key; value=$value\n" );
}
}
split_space( 'lead=george wife=jane "his boy"=elroy' );
Outputs:
key=lead; value=george
key=wife; value=jane
key=his boy; value=elroy

Answer 3

PP posted a good solution. But just to make it sure, that there is a cool other way to do it, comes my solution:
my $string = q~lead=george wife=jane "his boy"=elroy~;
my #split = split / (?=")/,$string;
my #split2;
foreach my $sp (#split) {
if ($sp !~ /"/) {
push #split2, $_ foreach split / /, $sp;
} else {
push #split2,$sp;
}
}
use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper #split2;
Output:
$VAR1 = 'lead=george';
$VAR2 = 'wife=jane';
$VAR3 = '"his boy"=elroy';
I use a Lookahead here for splitting at first the parts which keys are inside quotes " ". After that, i loop through the complete array and split all other parts, which are normal key=values.

Answer 4

You can get the required result using a single regexp, which extract the keys and the values and put the result inside a hash table.
(\w+|"[\w ]+") will match both a single and multiple word in the key side.
The regexp captures only the key and the value, so the result of the match operation will be a list with the following content: key #1, value #1, key #2, value#2, etc.
The hash is automatically initiated with the appropriate keys and values, when the match result is assigned to it.
here is the code
my $str = 'lead=george wife=jane "hello boy"=bye hello=world';
my %hash = ($str =~ m/(?:(\w+|"[\w ]+")=(\w+)(?:\s|$))/g);
## outputs the hash content
foreach $key (keys %hash) {
print "$key => $hash{$key}\n";
}
and here is the output of this script
lead => george
wife => jane
hello => world
"hello boy" => bye