regex - 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 sufficient anymore.

Example:

input : 'foo bar "lorem ipsum" baz'
output: ['foo', 'bar', 'lorem ipsum', 'baz']

I wonder whether this could be achieved with a single RegEx, rather than performing complex parsing or split-and-rejoin operations.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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']