parsings strings: extracting words and phrases [JavaScript]

Question

I need to support exact phrases (enclosed in quotes) in an otherwise space-separated list of terms. Thus splitting the respective string by the space-character is not suffic

Answer 1

Thanks a lot for the quick responses!

Here's a summary of the options, for posterity:

var input = 'foo bar "lorem ipsum" baz';

output = input.match(/("[^"]+"|[^"\s]+)/g);
output = input.match(/"[^"]*"|\w+/g);
output = input.match(/("[^"]*")|([^\s"]+)/g)
output = /(".+?"|\w+)/g.exec(input);
output = /"(.+?)"|(\w+)/g.exec(input);

For the record, here's the abomination I had come up with:

var input = 'foo bar "lorem ipsum" "dolor sit amet" baz';
var terms = input.split(" ");

var items = [];
var buffer = [];
for(var i = 0; i < terms.length; i++) {
    if(terms[i].indexOf('"') != -1) { // outer phrase fragment -- N.B.: assumes quote is either first or last character
        if(buffer.length === 0) { // beginning of phrase
            //console.log("start:", terms[i]);
            buffer.push(terms[i].substr(1));
        } else { // end of phrase
            //console.log("end:", terms[i]);
            buffer.push(terms[i].substr(0, terms[i].length - 1));
            items.push(buffer.join(" "));
            buffer = [];
        }
    } else if(buffer.length != 0) { // inner phrase fragment
        //console.log("cont'd:", terms[i]);
        buffer.push(terms[i]);
    } else { // individual term
        //console.log("standalone:", terms[i]);
        items.push(terms[i]);
    }
    //console.log(items, "\n", buffer);
}
items = items.concat(buffer);

//console.log(items);