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

var str = 'foo bar "lorem ipsum" baz';  
var results = str.match(/("[^"]+"|[^"\s]+)/g);

... returns the array you're looking for.
Note, however:

• Bounding quotes are included, so can be removed with replace(/^"([^"]+)"$/,"$1") on the results.
• Spaces between the quotes will stay intact. So, if there are three spaces between lorem and ipsum, they'll be in the result. You can fix this by running replace(/\s+/," ") on the results.
• If there's no closing " after ipsum (i.e. an incorrectly-quoted phrase) you'll end up with: ['foo', 'bar', 'lorem', 'ipsum', 'baz']

Answer 2

Expanding on the accepted answer, here's a search engine parser that,

• can match phrases or words
• treats phrases as regular expressions
• does a boolean OR across multiple properties (e.g. item.title and item.body)
• handles negation of words or phrases when they are prefixed with -

Treating phrases as regular expressions makes the UI simpler for my purposes.

const matchOrIncludes = (str, search, useMatch = true) => {
  if (useMatch) {
    let result = false
    try {
      result = str.match(search)
    } catch (err) {
      return false
    }
    return result
  }
  return str.includes(search)
}


const itemMatches = (item, searchString, fields) => {
  const keywords = searchString.toString().replace(/\s\s+/g, ' ').trim().toLocaleLowerCase().match(/(-?"[^"]+"|[^"\s]+)/g) || []
  for (let i = 0; i < keywords.length; i++) {
    const negateWord = keywords[i].startsWith('-') ? true : false
    let word = keywords[i].replace(/^-/,'')
    const isPhraseRegex = word.startsWith('"') ? true : false
    if (isPhraseRegex) {
      word = word.replace(/^"(.+)"$/,"$1")
    }
    let word_in_item = false
    for (const field of fields) {
      if (item[field] && matchOrIncludes(item[field].toLocaleLowerCase(), word, isPhraseRegex)) {
        word_in_item = true
        break
      }
    }
    if ((! negateWord && ! word_in_item) || (negateWord && word_in_item)) {
      return false
    }
  }
  return true
}

const item = {title: 'My title', body: 'Some text'}
console.log(itemMatches(item, 'text', ['title', 'body']))

Answer 3

A simple regular expression will do but leave the quotation marks. e.g.

'foo bar "lorem ipsum" baz'.match(/("[^"]*")|([^\s"]+)/g)
output:   ['foo', 'bar', '"lorem ipsum"', 'baz']

edit: beaten to it by shyamsundar, sorry for the double answer

Answer 4

'foo bar "lorem ipsum" baz'.match(/"[^"]*"|\w+/g);

the bounding quotes get included though