Question

I’m trying to find a way to spilt a string into single words OR phrases where the phrase is enclosed in quotes. For example:

javascript ‘sql server’ vbscript

would be split into:

• javascript
• sql server
• vbscript

I got help yesterday with this question which splits the string into single words using

/[-\w]+/g

I’ve been wrestling with the dark art of regular expressions and found this question which does a similar thing in php but even with the explanation it still doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me (and doesn’t work when I copy/paste into javascript!)

/"(?:\\\\.|[^\\\\"])*"|\S+/

Any help appreciated even a pointer to an easy to understand guide to regular expressions!

Answer 1

You should try the following:

/([-\w]+)|'([^']*)'/g

However, this is will fail if you have any form of single-quotes inside your quoted strings, that means, you cannot escape quotes with this construct.