Splitting a string with exceptions

Question

I have this string 'id,obj1,"string, etc",obj2', now I need to split this into an dict like this:

{
  1 = 'id',
  2 = 'obj1',
  3 = 'string, etc',
  4 = 'obj2'
}

I have been playing around with regular expressions, trying to divide the string but with no success. Any help is appreciated

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 22 '13 at 18:54

9

Something like the following may work for your use case:

>>> s = 'id,obj1,"string, etc",obj2'
>>> import csv
>>> dict(enumerate(next(csv.reader([s])),start=1))
{1: 'id', 2: 'obj1', 3: 'string, etc', 4: 'obj2'}

answered Feb 22 '13 at 18:54

Jon Clements

138,671
33
247
280

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 22 '13 at 19:00

You could apply a regular expression like /([^"]*)(?:"([^"]*)")?/ repeatedly to the input. On each match, the first subgroup match contains any elements that can be split by commas directly, and the second subgroup match (if there is one) contains a quoted entry.

Splitting a string with exceptions

2 Answers2