Question

I receive the response from a service as below. How to parse this into a Map? I first thought of split at whitespace but it doesn’t work as the value might contain spaces e.g. look at the value of SA key in the below response.

One option I thought of is to split at whitespace provided the previous character is a double quote. Not sure how to write the regex for this though.

TX=”0000000000108000001830001″ FI=”” OS=”8″ CI=”QU01SF1S2032″ AW=”SSS” SA=”1525 Windward Concourse”

Answer 1

Parse at quotes. You could even use a regular expression to find each key/value pair, assuming each value is in quotes. My only question would be, what are the rules for if a value contains embedded quotes? (Are they escaped using ‘\’ or such? Regardless, this is not currently accounted for in the below…)

For example:

(\w+)="([^"]*)"

This will even give you groups #1 and #2 that can be used to provide the key and the value, respectively.

Run this in a loop, using Java’s Matcher.find() method, until you find all of the pairs.

Sample code:

String input = "TX=\"0000000000108000001830001\" FI=\"\" OS=\"8\" CI=\"QU01SF1S2032\" AW=\"SSS\" SA=\"1525 Windward Concourse\"";

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\s*(\\w+)=\"([^\"]*)\"\\s*");

Matcher m = p.matcher(input);
while(m.find()){
    System.out.println(m.group(1));
    System.out.println(m.group(2));
}

Output:

TX
0000000000108000001830001
FI

OS
8
CI
QU01SF1S2032
AW
SSS
SA
1525 Windward Concourse