I answered a question on the Perl forum today about splitting CSV. CSV is a comma separated format; for example:

blah,blah,blah

You can put values in quotes:

blah,"blah blah",blah

And those quotes make commas within them meaningless too:

blah,"blah,blah,blah",blah

If we do the naive thing and implement it using split on a comma:

my @fields = split(/,/, $string);

Then we will obviously get the Wrong Answer. The question was, is there a regex we can use with split that will do the Right Thing? And the answer was yes, though it took me a few minutes to come up with it. The thing is that we don't want to match anything more than the commas we are splitting on, but we do need to do some analysis on the string that is up ahead (or behind us) to detect if the comma we are seeing is in quotes...

I've spent the last few days at the French Perl Workshop. As well as my brand new talk, I gave two re-runs of two that I had given before. One was entirely new to the French audience, and the other one was from quite a while back and given a face lift so it seemed new (in fact, it was the first talk I ever gave to the Perl community; it was on the topic of web security, and from the web code I encounter it is no less relevant today than it was then). That was 100 minutes worth of talks, which was a pleasure thanks to a great audience...

I've got a brand new talk in the works, which I will be delivering at both the French Perl Workshiop (Lyon, 16th-17th November) and the Israeli Perl Workshiop (Tel Aviv, 31st December). I will be talking on the topic of parallelism - why we need to do it, how (not) to screw it up, what Perl 6 will bring to the table and some of the latest research for future ideas, including lock-free data structures. I hope to announce more European dates for the talk over the coming months, subject to it being accepted at more conferences.