Ruby: Is there a way to split a string only with the first x occurrencies?

Question

For example, suppose I have this:

001, "john doe", "male", 37, "programmer", "likes dogs, women, and is lazy"

The problem is that the line is only supposed to have 6 fields. But if I separate it with split I get more, due to the comma being used improperly to separate the fields.

Right now I'm splitting everything, then when I get to the 5-th index onward I concatenate all the strings. But I was wondering if there was a split(",",6) or something along these lines.

Answer 1

Ruby has a CSV module in the standard library. It will do what you really need here (ignore commas in doubles quotes).

require 'CSV.rb'
CSV::Reader.parse("\"cake, pie\", bacon") do |row| p row; end

result:

["cake, pie", " bacon"]
=> nil

You might want to strip the results if you're dim like me and stick whitespace everywhere.