NAME

Text::ParseWords - parse text into an array of tokens

SYNOPSIS

  use Text::ParseWords;
  @words = &quotewords($delim, $keep, @lines);
  @words = &shellwords(@lines);
  @words = &old_shellwords(@lines);

DESCRIPTION

&quotewords() accepts a delimiter (which can be a regular expression) and a list of lines and then breaks those lines up into a list of words ignoring delimiters that appear inside quotes.

The $keep argument is a boolean flag. If true, the quotes are kept with each word, otherwise quotes are stripped in the splitting process. $keep also defines whether unprotected backslashes are retained.

A &shellwords() replacement is included to demonstrate the new package. This version differs from the original in that it will _NOT_ default to using $_ if no arguments are given. I personally find the old behavior to be a mis-feature.

&quotewords() works by simply jamming all of @lines into a single string in $_ and then pulling off words a bit at a time until $_ is exhausted.

AUTHORS

Hal Pomeranz (pomeranz@netcom.com), 23 March 1994

Basically an update and generalization of the old shellwords.pl. Much code shamelessly stolen from the old version (author unknown).