I want to take all words from a string and convert them into an array, but i don't want to break sentences that are enclosed in quotes
My code:
const content = 'this is a simple text that i "need to split into" arguments'
const args = content.split(/ +/g)
console.log(args)
// Result: ['this', 'is', 'a', 'simple', 'text', 'that', 'i', '"need', 'to', 'split', 'into"', 'arguments']
What do I need as a result:
// Result: ['this', 'is', 'a', 'simple', 'text', 'that', 'i', 'need to split into', 'arguments']
One simple approach would be to use string match() along with the regex pattern ".*?"|\w+. This pattern will eagerly first try to find a next doubly-quoted term. That failing, it will search for a single word. This approach avoids the possibility of consuming words which appear inside double quotes.
var content = 'this is a simple text that i "need to split into" arguments';
var matches = content.match(/".*?"|\w+/g);
for (var i=0; i < matches.length; ++i) {
matches[i] = matches[i].replace(/^"(.*)"$/, "$1");
}
console.log(matches);Assuming there are no escaped quotes, and the quotes are correctly paired up.
const content = 'this is a simple text that i "need to split into" arguments'
args = content.split(/\s(?=(?:[^"]*"[^"]*")*[^"]*$)/g);
console.log(args);