Split a string ignoring quoted sections

Question

Given a string like this:

a,\"string, with\",various,\"values, and some\",quoted

What is a good algorithm to split this based on

Answer 1

Since you said language agnostic, I wrote my algorithm in the language that's closest to pseudocode as posible:

def find_character_indices(s, ch):
    return [i for i, ltr in enumerate(s) if ltr == ch]


def split_text_preserving_quotes(content, include_quotes=False):
    quote_indices = find_character_indices(content, '"')

    output = content[:quote_indices[0]].split()

    for i in range(1, len(quote_indices)):
        if i % 2 == 1: # end of quoted sequence
            start = quote_indices[i - 1]
            end = quote_indices[i] + 1
            output.extend([content[start:end]])

        else:
            start = quote_indices[i - 1] + 1
            end = quote_indices[i]
            split_section = content[start:end].split()
            output.extend(split_section)

        output += content[quote_indices[-1] + 1:].split()                                                                 

    return output