Question

I’m trying to split the following string: "'aaa bbb' 0.05 ccc 3* 20*0.1"

so that the elements are:

0: aaa bbb
1: 0.05
2: ccc
3: 3*    
4: 20*0.1

I then want to loop over each of the results. The following snippet handles the first 3 elements, but not the last two:

Regex
    .Matches(input, @"(?<match>[-+]?[0-9]*\.?[0-9]+)|(?<match>\w+)|'(?<match>[\w\s]*)'")
    .Cast<Match>()
    .Select(m => m.Groups["match"].Value)
    .ToList()
    .ForEach(z => etc...

What should I add to the regex so that 3* and 20*0.01 are returned as single matches?

Answer 1

This regular expression matches the expressions the way you wanted:

foreach (var s in Regex.Matches("'aaa bbb' 0.05 ccc 3* 20*0.1", @"('[^']*'|\S+)")) {
    Console.WriteLine(s);
}

produces this output:

'aaa bbb'
0.05
ccc
3*
20*0.1

All you need to do is detecting if a value has single quotes around it, and unquote if necessary.