I want to split a string with a delimiter white space. but it should handle quoted strings intelligently. E.g. for a string like
"John Smith" Ted Barry
It should return three strings John Smith, Ted and Barry.
After messing around with it, you can use Regex for this. Run the equivalent of "match all" on:
((?<=("))[\w ]*(?=("(\s|$))))|((?<!")\w+(?!"))
A Java Example:
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
public class Test
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
String someString = "\"Multiple quote test\" not in quotes \"inside quote\" \"A work in progress\"";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("((?<=(\"))[\\w ]*(?=(\"(\\s|$))))|((?<!\")\\w+(?!\"))");
Matcher m = p.matcher(someString);
while(m.find()) {
System.out.println("'" + m.group() + "'");
}
}
}
Output:
'Multiple quote test'
'not'
'in'
'quotes'
'inside quote'
'A work in progress'
The regular expression breakdown with the example used above can be viewed here:
http://regex101.com/r/wM6yT9
With all that said, regular expressions should not be the go to solution for everything - I was just having fun. This example has a lot of edge cases such as the handling unicode characters, symbols, etc. You would be better off using a tried and true library for this sort of task. Take a look at the other answers before using this one.
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