Question

Basically, like if you were to say

var string = 'he said "Hello World"';
var splitted = string.split(" ");

the splitted array would be:

'he' 'said' '"Hello World"'

basically treating the quotation mark’d portion as a separate item

So how would I do this in javascript? Would I have to have a for loop that goes over the string checking if the scanner is inside a set of quotation marks? Or is there a simpler way?

Answer 1

You could use regular expressions:

var splitted = string.match(/(".*?")|(\S+)/g);

Basically it searches at first for strings with any characters between quotes (including spaces), and then all the remaining words in the string.

For example

var string = '"This is" not a string "without" "quotes in it"';
string.match(/(".*?")|(\S+)/g);

Returns this to the console:

[""This is"", "not", "a", "string", ""without"", ""quotes in it""]