CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubyregex
yerassyl
yerassyl

Reputation: 3048

.split and regular expression in Ruby

I want to split my string by (',') but ignore ',' if they are inside quotes. For example

" 2,2,4,'hello', 'world', 'hi, there' "

I want to split it so 'hi, there' will not be split into two different array elements in ruby. How can I do that? Probably use some regex?

EDIT: IF I use this, (from link to possible dublicate) 

values = values.split(',(?=([^\"]*\"[^\"]*\")*[^\"]*$)', -1)

my string is split correctly, but now I can not use .delete_at() method on my array. Before I could do:

values.delete_at(20)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 226

Answers (2)

Cary Swoveland
Cary Swoveland

Reputation: 110665

Here's a non-regex solution:

str = " 2,2,4,'hello', 'world', 'hi, there' "

first_quote_read = false 
str.each_char.with_object (['']) do |c,a|
  if c == ?, && !first_quote_read
    a << ''
  else
    a[-1] << c
    first_quote_read = !first_quote_read if c == ?'      
  end
end
  #=> [" 2", "2", "4", "'hello'", " 'world'", " 'hi, there' "]

Upvotes: 1

Amadan
Amadan

Reputation: 198314

Very well. Taking inspiration from this answer, the regular expression you are looking for is:

values.split(/,(?=(?:[^']*'[^']*')*[^']*$)/)

This will not work if you have escaped quotes, for example (e.g. "'O\'Reilly\'s car'").

However, this looks a bit like an XY problem. If you want to parse CSV, as it seems, and if this was a compliant CSV, you could use CSV.parse or CSV.parse_line. It is not, due to extra spaces between column separators. Using standard formats and standard parsers is, if possible, almost always preferable to home-grown solutions.

Upvotes: 2

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