How do I split this certain kind of string into an array in ruby

Asked Jan 16 '15 at 10:39

Active Jan 16 '15 at 10:44

Viewed 38 times

I have a string looking somewhat like this:

s = "'value 1', 'value 2', 'foo, bar'"

What I'd like to end up with is an array like this:

arr = ["value 1", "value 2", "foo, bar"]

Obviously I can't just split by comma, because there can be commas in the substrings themselves. Does anyone have a clue how to do this?

asked Jan 16 '15 at 10:39

NickEckhart

2

`s.split(/,\s*(?=(?:'[^']*'|[^'])+$)/)` – Avinash Raj Jan 16 '15 at 10:48
You can split your string on a single quote character and take every odd value, instead of using regexes – yoavmatchulsky Jan 16 '15 at 10:54
thanks, regex worked perfectly! sorry for the duplicate, thought there might be a ruby way to do this. – NickEckhart Jan 16 '15 at 11:16
This is actually a well-known serialization format called *CSV*, and there is a library in the stdlib for parsing it. – Jörg W Mittag Jan 16 '15 at 12:57

0 Answers0