From: Vivek <krishna.vivek@...>
Date: 2008-07-13T15:16:19+09:00
Subject: Re: regular expressions help

Hi David and others,

> On the (usually misappropriated, but hopefully not here) Occam's Razor
> principle[1], I would refrain from positing that there's actually
> supposed to be a comma between the second "hello" and "world", or that
> the quotation marks that were removed to illustrate the results are
> actually supposed to be reinstated as literals. We can wait for a
> ruling from Vivek, though; he's now got just about every permutation
> to choose from :-) (Including shellwords, thanks to Harry, and that of
> course is the best. Or at least, if Occam is right, then Harry is
> right :-)



 Thanks for the replies..Indeed I don't want the quotes to be a part
of the string
This one suggested above by works for me


irb(main):028:0> s
=> "hi there \"hello world\" namaste \"yo man\" \"gutten morgen\" ola
\"what's up\" world"
irb(main):029:0> s.scan(/"([^"]+)"|(\w+)/).flatten.compact
=> ["hi", "there", "hello world", "namaste", "yo man", "gutten
morgen", "ola", "what's up", "world"]



I presume that should capture pretty much any kind of combination..
and I don't have the case where there are nested " so that looks good.
(unless someone can think of a case that breaks )
thanks so much..I had hit a dead end trying to do this!!

Vivek Krishna