RegEx in Ruby for Converting CSV to TSV

Question

In Ruby, what's a regular expression that identifies commas within quotes (e.g., "dog, cat, foo, bar")? My purpose is converting a CSV file to TSV, and some of my fields contain strings with commas within quotes that I want to preserve.

CSV files can play real havoc with a regex because of the potential for embedded commas inside fields. As @Doon suggested you're better off relying on a parser. — the Tin Man
– the Tin Man, Commented Dec 10, 2010 at 19:58

Doon · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-10 17:32:36Z

3

Does it have to be a regex? Can just Parse the CSV using your fav csv library, and then rejoin using tabs?

require 'csv'

 test = '"foo,bar,baz",one,two,three'
 CSV.parse_line(test).join("\t")

  "foo,bar,baz\tone\ttwo\tthree"

answered Dec 10, 2010 at 17:32

Doon

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2 Comments

mbm Over a year ago

Thank ya, Doon! I ended up using FasterCSV::parse_line which worked as expected.

Lri Over a year ago

Converting a file (that doesn't contain tabs): CSV.read("temp.csv").map { |row| row.join("\t") }.join("\n").

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