Treat phrase in quotes as a word in javascript

Question

I'm trying to find a way to spilt a string into single words OR phrases where the phrase is enclosed in quotes. For example:

javascript 'sql server' vbscript

would be split into:

javascript
sql server
vbscript

I got help yesterday with this question which splits the string into single words using

/[-\w]+/g

I've been wrestling with the dark art of regular expressions and found this question which does a similar thing in php but even with the explanation it still doesn't make a great deal of sense to me (and doesn't work when I copy/paste into javascript!)

/"(?:\\\\.|[^\\\\"])*"|\S+/

Any help appreciated even a pointer to an easy to understand guide to regular expressions!

This is equivalent to parsing CSV where the separator is a space. It would be better to use a state machine. — Dan D., May 02 '12 at 11:35
Wow you guys are quick. Just found this question which uses: /\w+|"[^"]+"/g Still in the dark as to how it works but it does. — Derek, May 02 '12 at 11:56

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 02 '12 at 11:41

1

You should try the following:

/([-\w]+)|'([^']*)'/g

However, this is will fail if you have any form of single-quotes inside your quoted strings, that means, you cannot escape quotes with this construct.

answered May 02 '12 at 11:41

Daniel Baulig

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 02 '12 at 11:44

1

try this:

var pattern = /('[^']+'|[-\w]+)/g;
var text = "javascript 'sql server' vbscript";
console.log(text.match(pattern));

answered May 02 '12 at 11:44

tarmaq

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 02 '12 at 11:41

Maybe you could try this var text = ... var split = function(tx) {return tx.split("\'", } This should split it along quotes. Then just use the length to figure it out, as all the even numbered indexes are quotes. Then join the odd indexes and do a split(" ") to get the words

Treat phrase in quotes as a word in javascript

3 Answers3