C# advanced String.Split

Question

I have a string similar to this one:

The boy said to his mother, "Can I have some candy?"

If I do a normal String.Split on it, I get:

{ 'The', 'boy', 'said', 'to', 'his', 'mother', '"Can', 'I', 'have', 'some', 'candy?"' }

I want an array like so:

{ 'The', 'boy', 'said', 'to', 'his', 'mother', 'Can I have some candy?' }

Obviously, I could just loop through character by character and keep track of whether I'm in a string or not and all that... but is there a better way? With Regexs perhaps?

consider "parse string like shell" as a useful phrase for this sort of ask — user166390
– user166390, Commented Jun 4, 2011 at 22:53

MRAB · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-04 22:32:05Z

9

How about finding all the matches of this regex:

"[^"]*"|\S+

answered Jun 4, 2011 at 22:32

MRAB

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2 Comments

Entity Over a year ago

This is great! One more thing though... is it possible to remove the quotes from the "Can I have some candy?" match?

Ry- Over a year ago

@TheAdamGaskins: String.Trim('"').

Michael Entin · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-04 22:50:44Z

Depends a bit on your requirements. E.g. do you need to treat AAA"BBB (no spaces) as signle word, or two words? If AAA"BBB is a single word, and " only starts a qouted field after delimiter - this looks like CSV parser. Of course, CSV has other rules, like double qoutes to mean literal quote, etc - but you would need to define some similar rules too.

So you can adapt any open source CSV parser, or see if e.g. Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.TextFieldParser works for you

        string msg = "The boy said to his mother, \"Can I have some candy?\"";
        System.IO.MemoryStream s = new System.IO.MemoryStream(Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(msg));
        TextFieldParser p = new TextFieldParser(s, Encoding.Unicode);
        p.Delimiters = new string[] { " ", "," };
        foreach(var f in p.ReadFields().Where(f => f != ""))
            Console.WriteLine(f);

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