How can I split a JavaScript string by white space or comma?

Question

If I try

\"my, tags are, in here\".split(\" ,\")

I get the following

[ \'my, tags are, in here\' ]

Wherea

Answer 1

The suggestion to use .split(/[ ,]+/) is good, but with natural sentences sooner or later you'll end up getting empty elements in the array. e.g. ['foo', '', 'bar'].

Which is fine if that's okay for your use case. But if you want to get rid of the empty elements you can do:

var str = 'whatever your text is...';
str.split(/[ ,]+/).filter(Boolean);

Answer 2

"my, tags are, in here".split(/[ ,]+/)

the result is :

["my", "tags", "are", "in", "here"]

Answer 3

String.split() can also accept a regular expression:

input.split(/[ ,]+/);

This particular regex splits on a sequence of one or more commas or spaces, so that e.g. multiple consecutive spaces or a comma+space sequence do not produce empty elements in the results.

Answer 4

input.split(/\s*[\s,]\s*/)

… \s* matches zero or more white space characters (not just spaces, but also tabs and newlines).

... [\s,] matches one white space character or one comma

If you want to avoid blank elements from input like "foo,bar,,foobar", this will do the trick:

input.split(/(\s*,?\s*)+/)

The + matches one or more of the preceding character or group.

Edit:

Added ?after comma which matches zero or one comma.

Edit 2:

Turns out edit 1 was a mistake. Fixed it. Now there has to be at least one comma or one space for the expression to find a match.

Answer 5

When I want to take into account extra characters like your commas (in my case each token may be entered with quotes), I'd do a string.replace() to change the other delimiters to blanks and then split on whitespace.

Answer 6

you can use regex in order to catch any length of white space, and this would be like:

var text = "hoi how     are          you";
var arr = text.split(/\s+/);

console.log(arr) // will result : ["hoi", "how", "are", "you"]

console.log(arr[2]) // will result : "are"