Question

Can someone provide a regular expression for parsing name/value pairs from a string? The pairs are separated by commas, and the value can optionally be enclosed in quotes. For example:

AssemblyName=foo.dll,ClassName='SomeClass',Parameters='Some,Parameters' 

Answer 1

• No escape:

  /([^=,]*)=('[^']*'|[^,']*)/ 

• Double quote escape for both key and value:

  /((?:'[^']*'|[^=,])*)=((?:'[^']*'|[^=,])*)/  key=value,'key with '' in it'='value with '' in it',key=value' 'with' 'spaces 

• Backslash string escape:

  /([^=,]*)=('(?:\\.|[^'\\]+)*'|[^,']*)/  key=value,key='value',key='val\'ue' 

• Full backslash escape:

  /((?:\\.|[^=,]+)*)=('(?:\\.|[^'\\]+)*'|(?:\\.|[^,'\\]+)*)/  key=value,key='value',key='val\'ue',ke\,y=val\,ue 

Edit: Added escaping alternatives.

Edit2: Added another escaping alternative.

You would have to clean up the keys/values by removing any escape-characters and surrounding quotes.