Split a special string into an array

Question

I have this string

var string = 'foo , bar , "special1,special2,special3" , "random1,random2" , normal , another item'

I want to split this on , and keep the things within quotes as is in the array i.e i do not want to split the string within quotes. So the expected output would be

var array = ['foo', 'bar', 'special1,special2,special3', 'random1,random2', 'normal', 'another item']

@Pointy I tried splitting on using `split(',')`. Of course it did not work. I tried for loops to detect quotes. That did not give me results either. Why the downvote? — Anubhav, Dec 24 '15 at 14:43
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6462578/alternative-to-regex-match-all-instances-not-inside-quotes — epascarello, Dec 24 '15 at 14:44

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 24 '15 at 15:33

2

You can split the string by the , separator and then remove the double-quotes from any element of array.

var string = 'foo , bar , "special1,special2,special3" , "random1,random2" , normal , another item';

var array = string.split(' , ').map(function(x) {
  return x.replace(/"/g, "")
});

alert(JSON.stringify(array));

edited Dec 24 '15 at 15:33

nicael

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answered Dec 24 '15 at 14:38

void

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3

This wont work. It will split the things inside the quotes too. – Anubhav Dec 24 '15 at 14:39
Why downvotes? Check the updated answer. – void Dec 24 '15 at 14:41
@void you are late :). Though my vote is up only :D – Pardeep Dhingra Dec 24 '15 at 14:41
@PardeepDhingra yeah but i am correct :) – void Dec 24 '15 at 14:42
I've removed your ES6 piece of code, because the question doesn't specifically ask about ES6, and not every browser supports ES6 yet. – nicael Dec 24 '15 at 15:34

Split a special string into an array

1 Answers1