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Given a string like this:
a,’string, with’,various,’values, and some’,quoted
What is a good algorithm to split this based on commas while ignoring the commas inside the quoted sections?
The output should be an array:
[ ‘a’, ‘string, with’, ‘various’, ‘values, and some’, ‘quoted’ ]
If my language of choice didn’t offer a way to do this without thinking then I would initially consider two options as the easy way out:
Pre-parse and replace the commas within the string with another control character then split them, followed by a post-parse on the array to replace the control character used previously with the commas.
Alternatively split them on the commas then post-parse the resulting array into another array checking for leading quotes on each array entry and concatenating the entries until I reached a terminating quote.
These are hacks however, and if this is a pure ‘mental’ exercise then I suspect they will prove unhelpful. If this is a real world problem then it would help to know the language so that we could offer some specific advice.