Convert a string into shell arguments

Question

I'm interested how is parsed the bash input into arguments.

For example, by using process.argv we get an array of strings in NodeJS (but this is language agnostic).

My question is how can I parse an input like "node foo.js --foo "bar baz" -b foo" into an array like process.argv (or the equivalent in other languages) returns (e.g. ["node", "foo.js", "--foo", "\"bar baz\"", "-b", "foo"]?

Splitting by space is not enough (because of the quotes). Is it possible with some more complicated regex to handle the quotes and getting such an array?

Answer 1

Using the shell-quote NPM package will handle this.

var parse = require('shell-quote').parse;
parse('node foo.js --foo "bar baz" -b foo');

[ 'node', 'foo.js', '--foo', 'bar baz', '-b', 'foo' ]