Question

How can I parse the string like

Text=”Andrey\’s Photos; Vacation”;Font=Arial;Size=12

to the javascript object object like:

var options = {
  text: 'Andrey\'s Photos; Vacation',
  font: 'Arial',
  size: 12
}

My problem is that the value may contain ; and = characters, so I can not just use s.split(';'). But if there are such symbols in the values string, the value should be enclosed in single or double quotes. So the parsing of that string should be possible.

Answer 1

Assuming the answer is no:

var s = 'Text="Andrey\'s Photos; Vacation";Font=Arial;Size=12;SingleQuoted=\'The dog said "Foo"\'';
var re = /(.*?)=(?:"(.*?)"|'(.*?)'|([^;]*?))(?:;|$)/g;
var match;

var options = {}
while(match = re.exec(s))
{  
    var string_val = match[2] || match[3] || match[4];
    var num_val = parseFloat(string_val);
    var val = isNaN(num_val) ? string_val : num_val;
    options[match[1].toLowerCase()] = val;
}

EDIT: Edited to allow using either ‘ or ” as delimiter. However, you still can’t escape.

EDIT 2: Edited to use numeric type if applicable. Right now it just checks whether it can be coerced to a number, rather than trying to consider the quotes.