Split string by whitespace but not within brackets

Question

I've a string like this foo bar(5) baz(0, 3) and need to split it into its parts based on spaces between each. So the result needs to look like this: ['foo', 'bar(5)', 'baz(0, 3)'].

I tried something like this:

var str = 'foo bar(5) baz(0, 3)';
str.split(' '); // => ['foo', 'bar(5)', 'baz(0,', '3)']

As you can see the result is not what I expect... Any ideas how to split it correctly? I think it's a turn for the RegExp-gurus here...

Update

A simple way could be to replace all , with ,:

str.replace(/, /g, ',').split(' ');

But that doesn't look really pretty to me...

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 12 '13 at 06:42

5

You can use .match for this.

str.match(/\w+(\(.*?\))?/g)
=> ["foo", "bar(5)", "baz(0, 3)"]

answered Aug 12 '13 at 06:42

Dogbert

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Yeah, looks good :) Thanks so far... I'm of course not a regex-pro, however can we shorten this a bit? – yckart Aug 12 '13 at 06:46
@yckart I don't see why you want to shorten it ? I would rather try to improve it, maybe something like this `[^()\s]+(\(.*?\))?` – HamZa Aug 12 '13 at 06:50
Awesome :) Saved my day! – Pratik Mar 04 '16 at 10:51
HamZa's answer is good, but needs a slight tweak or it breaks with nested parentheses: `[^()\s]+(\(.*?\)+)?` – user3534080 Jul 26 '23 at 23:56

Split string by whitespace but not within brackets

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