Text::ParseWords(3pm)

Okay bestie, welcome to Text::ParseWords(3pm) from the Perl Programmers Reference Guide — the manual for parsing text into tokens, and honestly it’s giving useful. 💖

🌸 NAME 🌸

Text::ParseWords — parse text into an array of tokens or an array of arrays. ✨

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

use Text::ParseWords;
@lists = nested_quotewords($delim, $keep, @lines);
@words = quotewords($delim, $keep, @lines);
@words = shellwords(@lines);
@words = parse_line($delim, $keep, $line);
@words = old_shellwords(@lines); # DEPRECATED!

old_shellwords() is marked DEPRECATED! — just so we’re clear, bestie. 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

The nested_quotewords() and quotewords() functions accept a delimiter (which can be a regular expression) and a list of lines, and then break those lines up into a list of words while ignoring delimiters that appear inside quotes. quotewords() returns all of the tokens in a single long list, while nested_quotewords() returns a list of token lists corresponding to the elements of @lines. parse_line() does tokenizing on a single string. The *quotewords() functions simply call parse_line(), so if you’re only splitting one line you can call parse_line() directly and save a function call. 🫶

The $keep flag controls what happens with delimiters and special characters:

• true — if true, then the tokens are split on the specified delimiter, but all other characters (including quotes and backslashes) are kept in the tokens. 🌈
• false — if $keep is false then the *quotewords() functions remove all quotes and backslashes that are not themselves backslash-escaped or inside of single quotes (i.e., quotewords() tries to interpret these characters just like the Bourne shell). NB: these semantics are significantly different from the original version of this module shipped with Perl 5.000 through 5.004. 😭
• "delimiters" — as an additional feature, $keep may be the keyword "delimiters", which causes the functions to preserve the delimiters in each string as tokens in the token lists, in addition to preserving quote and backslash characters. 🎀

shellwords() is written as a special case of quotewords(), and it does token parsing with whitespace as a delimiter — similar to most Unix shells. 🐚

🎀 EXAMPLES 🎀

The sample program:

use Text::ParseWords;
@words = quotewords('\s+', 0, q{this   is "a test" of\ quotewords \"for you});
$i = 0;
foreach (@words) {
    print "$i: <$_>\n";
    $i++;
}

produces:

0: <this>
1: <is>
2: <a test>
3: <of quotewords>
4: <"for>
5: <you>

demonstrating:

• 0 — a simple word
• 1 — multiple spaces are skipped because of our $delim
• 2 — use of quotes to include a space in a word
• 3 — use of a backslash to include a space in a word
• 4 — use of a backslash to remove the special meaning of a double-quote
• 5 — another simple word (note the lack of effect of the backslashed double-quote)

Replacing quotewords('\s+', 0, q{this is...}) with shellwords(q{this is...}) is a simpler way to accomplish the same thing. 👑

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

Text::CSV — for parsing CSV files. 📊

👑 AUTHORS 👑

The original author is unknown, but presumably this evolved from "shellwords.pl" in Perl 4. 🦋

Much of the code for parse_line() (including the primary regexp) came from Joerk Behrends <jbehrends@multimediaproduzenten.de>. 💜

Examples section and other documentation provided by John Heidemann <johnh@ISI.EDU>. 🌸

Hal Pomeranz <pomeranz@netcom.com> maintained this from 1994 through 1999, and did the first CPAN release. ✨

Alexandr Ciornii <alexchornyATgmail.com> maintained this from 2008 to 2015. 🎀

Many other people have contributed, with special thanks due to Michael Schwern <schwern@envirolink.org> and Jeff Friedl <jfriedl@yahoo-inc.com>. 🫶

💖 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE 💖

This library is free software; you may redistribute and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. 💅

🫶 That’s the page, bestie! Footer vibes: source/version perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-11-03, manual name Text::ParseWords(3pm) — iconic, no cap. 💖✨