From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2006-01-09T20:53:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Splitting strings on spaces, unless inside quotes

Geoff Jacobsen wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 18:13 +0900, William James wrote:
>> Richard Livsey wrote:
>>> I want to split a string into words, but group quoted words together
>>> such that...
>>>
>>> some words "some quoted text" some more words
>>>
>>> would get split up into:
>>>
>>> ["some", "words", "some quoted text", "some", "more", "words"]
>>
>> s = 'some words "some quoted text" some more words'
>> p s.split( / *"(.*?)" *| / )
>>
>
> Which along with the CSV solution can't handle complex cases:
>
>  s='one two"  "\'with quotes\' "three "'
>
>  s.split( / *"(.*?)" *| / )
>  => ["one", "two", "  ", "'with", "quotes'", "three "]
>
>  require 'csv'
>  CSV::parse_line(s)
>  => []
>
> but Shellwords can:
>
>  require 'shellwords'
>  Shellwords.shellwords(s)
>  => ["one", "two  with quotes", "three "]

Another option is to use scan instead of split:

>> 'some words "some quoted text" some more words'.scan
%r{"(?:(?:[^"]|\\.)*)"|\S+}
=> ["some", "words", "\"some quoted text\"", "some", "more", "words"]

With some additional effort even the quotes can be removed (using grouping
for example).

>> r=[];'some words "some quoted text" some more
words'.scan(%r{"((?:[^"]|\\.)*)"|(\S+)}) {|m| r << m.detect {|x|x}};r
=> ["some", "words", "some quoted text", "some", "more", "words"]

Kind regards

    robert