Need help string.split()

Question

I have some data in a format like

int,int,'string',int,'string'

Every string is enclosed by '', my problems is that some strings contains commas, how can I make sure that string.split() doesn't split when inside '' ?

Use a parser for this. `String.split()` is an entirely inadequate tool for such tasks. — Andrew Thompson, May 13 '13 at 09:39
Check out [here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1757065/java-splitting-a-comma-separated-string-but-ignoring-commas-in-quotes) — Jayamohan, May 13 '13 at 09:42
Thanks Jayamohan, that was exactly my problem, and I got it working now! :) — user2377181, May 13 '13 at 09:48

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 13 '13 at 09:49

If you are creating the data yourself you can use a different delimiter which you use as the delimiter on splitting.

Alternatively you could use the split normally with the comma as a delimiter and then go through the array and for each string entry count the number of quotes found and recombine elements containing single quote which flow eachother in the array order.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 13 '13 at 09:56

Can you use a Regular expression like "/(".*?"|[^",\s]+)(?=\s*,|\s*$)/g" and use split() and check if it works ? Something like this :

String str = "int,int,'string',int,'string','string,int'";
String[] arr = str.split("/('.*?'|[^',\\s]+)(?=\\s*,|\\s*$)/g");
for(String string:arr){
     System.out.println(string);
}

Need help string.split()

2 Answers2