Split a string that has white spaces, unless they are enclosed within "quotes"?

Question

To make things simple:

string streamR = sr.ReadLine();  // sr.Readline results in:                                  //                         one "two two" 

I want to be able to save them as two different strings, remove all spaces EXCEPT for the spaces found between quotation marks. Therefore, what I need is:

string 1 = one string 2 = two two 

So far what I have found that works is the following code, but it removes the spaces within the quotes.

//streamR.ReadLine only has two strings   string[] splitter = streamR.Split(' ');     str1 = splitter[0];     // Only set str2 if the length is >1     str2 = splitter.Length > 1 ? splitter[1] : string.Empty; 

The output of this becomes

one two 

I have looked into Regular Expression to split on spaces unless in quotes however I can't seem to get regex to work/understand the code, especially how to split them so they are two different strings. All the codes there give me a compiling error (I am using System.Text.RegularExpressions)

Answer 1

string input = "one \"two two\" three \"four four\" five six"; var parts = Regex.Matches(input, @"[\""].+?[\""]|[^ ]+")                 .Cast<Match>()                 .Select(m => m.Value)                 .ToList();