Question

This sample data is returned by Web Service

200,6, “California, USA”

I want to split them using split(",") and tried to see the result using simple code.

String loc = "200,6,\"California, USA\"";       
String[] s = loc.split(",");

for(String f : s)
   System.out.println(f);

Unfortunately this is the result

200
6
"California
 USA"

The expected result should be

200
6
"California, USA"

I tried different regular expressions and no luck. Is it possible to escape the given regular expression inside of "" ?

UPDATE 1: Added C# Code

UPDATE 2: Removed C# Code

Answer 1

,(?=(?:[^"]|"[^"]*")*$)

This is the regex you want
(To put it in the split function you’ll need to escape the quotes in the string)

Explanation

You need to find all ‘,’s not in quotes..
That is you need lookahead (http://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html) to see whether your current matching comma is within quotes or out.

To do that we use lookahead to basically ensure the current matching ‘,’ is followed by an EVEN number of ‘”‘ characters (meaning that it lies outside quotes)

So
(?:[^"]|"[^"]*")*$ means match only when there are non quote characters till the end OR a pair of quotes with anything in between them

(?=(?:[^"]|"[^"]*")*$) will lookahead for the above match

,(?=(?:[^"]|"[^"]*")*$) and finally this will match all ‘,’ with the above lookahead