Regex to not split string on [ if it comes under " "

Question

I am looking to split my string on basis of [, ]. But there is one restriction, if the [, ] comes within " ", we should ignore them .

Example :

For a string:

"""hello "hi" [abc: "pqr[abc]"] bye | [xyz]"""

the splitted strings should be :

hello "hi"
abc: "pqr[abc]"
bye |
xyz

Answer 1

If you really need to split, then you can use look-ahead to check that the number of quotes that follows the candidate delimiter is even:

[\][](?=[^"]*(?:"[^"]*"[^"]*)*$)

But look-ahead is quite inefficient. If it is acceptable to do the opposite and find the matches between the delimiters (with find()), instead of splitting, then you can use:

(?:[^"\][]|"[^"]*")+

Answer 2

One of possible solutions (which doesn't require tricky regexps) might be as follows:

(1) split without regard to quotes

(2) count (cumulative) numbers of quotes at each resulting component

(3) re-join at boundaries where such a number is odd

Answer 3

Instead of trying to split, you can use the find() method and describe all that isn't a square bracket except for parts between quotes:

[^\]\["]+(?:"[^"]*"[^\]\["]*)*|(?:"[^"]*"[^\]\["]*)+

(Dont't forget to add backslashes in your pattern string.)

demo