SCAN FROM STRING fails with empty quoted strings

[CoastalMaineBird]

I'm scanning a long text line withe SCAN FROM STRING.

My problem comes in the first instance of this part: "[^"]"

The string I am scanning has quotes in it - I want to extract the quoted string as one item.

I can't use %s because the string might have spaces within it.

The format string works fine unless the quoted string is empty  ("").

I interpret  "[^"]" as QUOTE,any number of things that aren't a QUOTE, QUOTE.

Apparently, the "any number" doesn't include zero, as it fails (error 85: data doesn't match format) when the quotes are empty.

What am I missing?

[mikeporter]

This doesn't answer your question directly, but I have never had a lot of luck using this function with long strings. I will use it for short chunks or perhaps a single value but not for something like what you show. Personal opinion of course, but I have always found it easier to break a long string into shorter segments and deal with each of the bits separately.

Mike...

[JÞB]

In this case- you are missing a regex.

And yes I heard the one about the programmer that had a problem and thought "I'll use a regex....."

Spoiler

Then he had two problems.

[crossrulz]

I'm with Jeff on this one.  You are going to need to use Regular Expressions to do what you want.

[CoastalMaineBird]

I have always found it easier to break a long string into shorter segments

Well, of course I did that, but it offers no help.  It's not the length of the string that is a problem.

If you try just "[^"]" in a test, and feed it "ABC" or "A" or "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog's back", it works fine.

Feed it "" and it complains.

[Darin.K · Accepted solution]

This confusion arises in RegExes as well, but you hit on the answer:  in the Simpsons "Zero is a percent" but in Scan from String nothing is not something.  You asked it to match something which is not a quote, and there is nothing there which is not a quote so it complains.

In this situation if I really wanted to keep the convenience of Scan From String I typically would use Search&Replace to replace "" with "\00" before scanning and then treat a string which only contains null as empty.

[CoastalMaineBird]

Thanks, Darin.  I was already moving in that direction. 

It slows down processing, but I can move to where I catch the errors and only do the substitution on those (few) cases where the empty quotes come up.

Thanks!