Question

I have a string like below…

var1=val1 var2=val2 var3="p1 p2 p3 p4" var4="p1 p2" var5=val5

Now how can I replace all the white spaces with underscore only inside "" using RegExp so that the string looks like below…

var1=val1 var2=val2 var3="p1_p2_p3_p4" var4="p1_p2" var5=val5

so that by using .replace('"','').split(' '), I can get an array like below…

Array(
   var1: "val1",
   var2: "val2",
   var3: "p1_p2_p3_p4",
   var4: "p1_p2",
   var5: "val5"
)

no jQuery please…

Answer 1

I know this has been answered but I thought I’d share this regex using a positive look-ahead. This allows you to replace without using a callback.

var str = 'var1=val1 var2=val2 var3="p1 p2 p3 p4" var4="p1 p2" var5=val5';

str = str.replace(/\s(?=[^=]*")/g, '_');

To explain:

\s        match a space...
(?=       start of positive look-ahead
[^=]*"    ...which is followed by anything except an =, up to a double-quote
)         end of positive look-ahead

Then the g will repeat the search