Parsing lines from CSV files using Regular Expression

Maybe I’m still a newbie at regular expressions, but I searched for a long time yesterday for something that actually works, failing with many code snippets that I found. I finally found something that actually works, so I am posting it here for the benefit of all.

Keep in mind that the challenging part is that commas inside quotations should not be treated as a delimiter, which seems to be where the challenge is coming from. I am posting this as a trackback to a blog post I found, because I am pretty much copying directly from there:

$expr = "/,(?=(?:[^\"]*\”[^\"]*\”)*(?![^\"]*\”))/”;

Example:

$matches = preg_split($expr,
           '2006-01-01, "Apples, Oranges, and Pears", $5.95');

(In case it wasn’t already obvious, this works on a per-line basis. Break your CSV file into lines first.)

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