Richard Suchenwirth 2001-05-31 - Robin Lauren <[email protected]> wrote in the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup:
I want to split an argument which contains spaces within quotes into proper name=value pairs. But I can't :)
Consider this example:
set tag {body type="text/plain" title="This is my body"}
set element [lindex $tag 0]
set attributes [lrange $tag 1 end] ;# *BZZT!* Wrong answer!My attributes becomes the list {type="text/plain"} {title="This} {is} {my} {body"} (perhaps even with the optional backslash before the quotes), which isn't really what i had in mind.
To a human, $tag intuitively looks like a list of three items, but according to Tcl list syntax, it has 6 items, and the second item, for example, contains two literal quotes. One solution would be to see $tag as a string, and split it on the double-quote characters into a list. Each item in the list that ends in "=" is now followed by an item that is the contents of what was in double quotes in the original string. The solution below assumes that quoted items only begin after an "=" character, and that there is no way within double quotes to escape another double quote:
set result {}
foreach {out in} [split $tag {"}] {
#catch the case where quote is the last character
if {$out eq {}} break
foreach i $out {
if [regexp =$ $i] {
set i [list [string range $i 0 end-1] $in]
}
lappend result $i
}
}% set result
body {type text/plain} {title {This is my body}}
set attributes [lrange $result 1 end]
{type text/plain} {title {This is my body}}Another solution uses [regexp], with the same caveats as the previous one:
set matches [regexp -all -inline {([^ =]+)=(\S+|"[^"]+")} $tag]
set result [list]
foreach {dummy key value} $matches {
set value [string trim $value {"}]
lappend result $key $value
}%puts $result
{type text/plain} {title {This is my body}}That will also match single-word vars which aren't in quotes (short=foo long="foo bar"). It currently dies on empty strings (short= or long="") but just replace the +'s with *'s to make those acceptable.