Years ago I saw this problem asked of Jeffrey Friedl (author of Mastering Regular Expressions) in an OSCON session where he invited folks to provide problems to solve. I didn't write down the final result, but it was a multi-line expression that took him (and members of the group) most of the hour to get to.
I think an "elegant" regex might be out of the question for this. Simon R wrote: > OK... I've been toying with this for a day now and it's time to set the > experts loose. I need to be able to split a string of the form > > foo,bar',name=simon,age=99 > > into its constituent parts (comma is the delimeter). So far so good and > very simple using split(). However, I also need to be able to handle the > case where there may be commas in a phrase enclosed by quote marks, in which > case we should NOT split on those commas; > > e.g. > > foo,bar,names="charlie,john,ann",ages='20,30,40' must be split to > > foo > bar > names="charlie,john,ann" > ages='20,30,40' > > Can anyone come up with a single regexp that I can use in a call to split() > that will handle this case, or another equally elegant solution ? > > TIA > > - Simon Rosenthal > Northern Light Technology LLC > > _______________________________________________ > Boston-pm mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm > _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
