Question

I have a string (from HTTP Header) and want to split it into a dictionary.

foo = \"bar\",baz=\"fooz\", beta= \"gamma\"

I ca not guarantee that the string is the same every time. Maybe there are spaces, maybe not, sometimes the double quotes are escaped, sometimes not.

So I found the solution in PHP with regular expressions. Unfortunately I can’t convert it to work on iOS.

preg_match_all('@('.$key.')=(?:([\'"])([^\2]+?)\2|([^\s,]+))@', $input, $hits, PREG_SET_ORDER);

foreach ($hits as $hit) {
    $data[hit[1]] = $hit[3] ? $hit[3] : $hit[4];
}

Can anybody help me converting this to Objective-C?

Answer 1

I met a guy which is kinda RegEx guru. He explained the whole stuff and I got the following (working!!!!) solution in RegEx.

This gives me strings like foo="bar":

(?<=[,\\s])((realm|qop|nonce|opaque)=(?:([\"'])([^\2]+?)\2|([^\\s,]+)))

I then use another RegEx to split it by key and value to create a dictionary.