Question

The question is simple. I have a string that contains multiple elements which are embedded in single-quotation marks:

var str = "'alice'   'anna marie' 'benjamin' 'christin'     'david' 'muhammad ali'"

And I want to parse it so that I have all those names in an array:

result = [
 'alice',
 'anna marie',
 'benjamin',
 'christin',
 'david',
 'muhammad ali'
]

Currently I’m using this code to do the job:

var result = str.match(/\s*'(.*?)'\s*'(.*?)'\s*'(.*?)'\s*'(.*?)'/);

But this regular expression is too long and it’s not flexible, so if I have more elements in the str string, I have to edit the regular expression.

What is the fastest and most efficient way to do this parsing? Performance and felxibility is important in our web application.

I have looked at the following question but they are not my answer:

• Regular Expression For Quoted String
• Regular Expression – How To Find Words and Quoted Phrases

Answer 1

Define the pattern once and use the global g flag.

var matches = str.match(/'[^']*'/g);

If you want the tokens without the single quotes around them, the normal approach would be to use sub-matches in REGEX – however JavaScript doesn’t support the capturing of sub-groups when the g flag is used. The simplest (though not necessarily most efficient) way around this would be to remove them afterwards, iteratively:

if (matches)
    for (var i=0, len=matches.length; i<len; i++)
        matches[i] = matches[i].replace(/'/g, '');

[EDIT] – as the other answers say, you could use split() instead, but only if you can rely on there always being a space (or some common delimiter) between each token in your string.