On Thursday 30 September 2004 23:40, Dany Cayouette wrote:
> Any advice/ideas on the best way of attacking field split on ';' when the
> string looks like:
>
> s = 'a;b;c\;;d;'
>
> i.e. field delimiter is ';', and if ; appears in field data ; => \;
>
> Any regex magic? or should I use s.each_byte and do it by hand?
>


hmmm.. your mail looks exactly like a mail I have replied to 2 minutes ago.
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/114414


something like this

irb(main):023:0> "aa;bbb\\;;abc;;d\\\\;e;f".scan(/(?:\A|;)((?:\\[^.]|[^;])*)/) 
{ p $1 }
"aa"
"bbb\\;"
"abc"
""
"d\\\\"
"e"
"f"
=> "aa;bbb\\;;abc;;d\\\\;e;f"
irb(main):024:0>


btw: are you solving some kind of exercise ?

--
Simon Strandgaard