Java Splitting Regex Issues inside quotations

Question

I am trying to split this string

String string1 = "Employee:\"Timothy Jones\" and Job:\"Senior Management\" and Hired:\"2003\"";

using

String[] splitArray = string1.split("###");

But I am having a lot of trouble with the regex to split it into what I want. My desired result is

employee, Timothy Jones, and, Job, Senior Mangement, and Hired, 2010

The main problem seems to be the text inside the quotes splitting on the whitespace.

`Employee:”Timothy Jones” and Job:”Senior Management” and Hired:”2003”` is not a valid string in Java. Please format your code and fix it so that it compiles before you post it. — Nir Alfasi, Sep 07 '14 at 01:51
this shouldn't even compile... you need to escape the double quotes then wrap the whole string in double quotes. — Mark Giaconia, Sep 07 '14 at 01:53
tried str.split("and|[:|\"]"); but i get [Employee, ”Timothy Jones” , Job, ”Senior Management” , Hired, ”2010”] — RedTangerine, Sep 07 '14 at 02:02
How come `and, Job,` are separate but `and Hired` is one result? What is your expected result? — hwnd, Sep 07 '14 at 02:03

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 07 '14 at 02:01

Use matching instead of splitting:

([A-Z][a-z]+ [A-Z][a-z]+|\w+)

A-Z][a-z]+ [A-Z][a-z]+ captures all the phrases like Timothy Jones, Senior Management etc., and \w+ captures the rest of the words.

Note, however, that this regex gives and and Hired as separate matches; I'm not sure why you would want them to be in a single match.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 07 '14 at 04:35

0

Or with matching:

".*?"|\S+

".*?" : All phrase surrounded by double quote \S+ : rest of words

answered Sep 07 '14 at 04:35

walid toumi

2 Answers2