Hello All,

This post is releated to the help provided to heatherc3 (Suggestions for perl resources? Dealing with csv data.)
Posted May 18th 2006 04:01 PM, and I could use the solutions posted there, if I could get to that as a starting point.

I want to work on a comma delimited file, however some of the data fields have a comma within the data.
The fields with commas within them are the first two in the record.
They are always enclosed by double quotes.
The file format looks something like the following....
"field1 random text, more text","field2 random text, more text in field2", field3, field4,field5
"field1 random text without comma","field2 random text, more text in field2", field3, field4,field5
"field1 random text, more text","field2 random text without comma", field3, field4,field5
"field1 random text without comma","field2 random text without comma", field3, field4,field5

If I do a split on comma I get varying number of fields as
line one above in my test file has 6 commas
line two above in my test file has 5 commas
line three above in my test file has 5 commas
line four above in my test file has 4 commas.

I was thinking the best way to approch this would be to search and replace commas, but only if they are enclosed within double quotes?
Can anybody tell me if that is the best way?
Thanks