How can I split a string by whitespace unless inside of a single quoted string?

Question

I\'m seeking a solution to splitting a string which contains text in the following format:

\"abcd efgh \'ijklm no pqrs\' tuv\"

which will p

Answer 1

So you've decided to use a regex? Now you have two problems.

Allow me to infer a little bit. You want an arbitrary number of fields, where a field is composed of text without containing a space, or it is separated by spaces and begins with a quote and ends with a quote (possibly with spaces inbetween).

In other words, you want to do what a command line shell does. You really should just reuse something. Failing that, you should capture a field at a time, with a regex something like:

^ *([^ ]+|'[^']*')(.*)

Where you append group one to your list, and continue the loop with the contents of group 2.

A single pass through a regex wouldn't be able to capture an arbitrarily large number of fields. You might be able to split on a regex (python will do this, not sure about perl), but since you are matching the stuff outside the spaces, I'm not sure that is even an option.