Parsing a Custom Delimited Text File in Ruby - Handling Edge Cases with Escaped Characters
I can't seem to get I'm collaborating on a project where I'm currently working on a Ruby application that needs to parse a custom delimited text file. The file uses a pipe (`|`) as a delimiter, but it also includes escaped characters represented by backslashes (`\`). For example: ``` Name|Age|City John Doe|29|New York\|Brooklyn Jane Smith|34|San Francisco\|California ``` I want to split each line into an array based on the pipe delimiter while preserving the escaped pipe characters. However, when I use the `split` method, it doesn't handle the escaped characters correctly, resulting in incorrect parsing. Here's what I have tried so far: ```ruby File.foreach('data.txt') do |line| fields = line.chomp.split('|') puts fields.inspect end ``` This code gives me output like this for the first line: ``` ["Name", "Age", "City"] ``` Which is what I expect for the header, but for the actual data lines, this is what I get: ``` ["John Doe", "29", "New York\", "Brooklyn"] ``` As you can see, the pipe in `New York|Brooklyn` is being treated as a delimiter instead of being preserved. I need a solution that correctly handles the escaped pipes in the city field. I also want to make sure this solution works for multiple lines and is efficient, as the file can have thousands of entries. I thought about using regex to capture the fields, but Iām not sure how to implement that effectively here without making the code too complex. Any suggestions on how to achieve this correctly? I'm developing on macOS with Ruby. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. This is happening in both development and production on Debian. I appreciate any insights! I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. I'm coming from a different tech stack and learning Ruby. Any ideas how to fix this?