Hi Johnny, thanks for the reply

On May 26, 1:43 ¨Âí¬ Êïèîîù Íïòòéã÷òïôåº
>
> Do you need to handle nested strings?

I'm not sure. I don't think so. I think the content is scrubbed
beforehand to replace all embedded " with '.

>
> # The messy input
> mess = [ " \"Only one line.\"", " \"line 1 ", " line 2.\"" ]
>
> # A single string, from the mess concatenated
> single = mess.join ""
> matches = single.scan /("[^"]*")/
> lines = matches.flatten
>
> # Pretty print the lines
> p lines
>

I'm not sure about the 'join' solution for 2 reasons:
 1) this array may be 1000's of lines long and I wonder what the
performance will be like.
 2) I'm thinking about getting rid of the initial array and reading
the data straight from the input files. In that case, i would have to
read in each line anyway.

Having said that, I will give this a try and see how it works with the
test data I have. Thanks!

>
> Have you considered writing a small lexer and parser?  ¨Âïõ íáâå
> better doing that, can handle weirder strings too.
>

No I haven't -- I don't know how to do that. yet.


Cheers!  Paul.