How To split String A,B,C,D,"E,F",G,H

Question

I want to split this String A,B,C,D,"E,F",G,H with comma(,) operator but not split the "E,F".. I want this following output.

A
B
C
D
E,F
G
H

Answer 1

this may help:

    String s = "A,B,C,D,\"E,F\",G,H";
    String[] tmp = s.split(",\"|\",");
    List<String> result = new ArrayList<>();

    for(int i=0; i<tmp.length; i++) {
        if (i % 2 == 0) {
            result.addAll(Arrays.asList(tmp[i].split(",")));
        }else {
            result.add(tmp[i]);
        }
    }

The result list contains the elements

Answer 2

This simple regex will match any string ending with a comma outside ": "([^\",]*\"[^\"]*\")*[^\",]*(,|$)", so you can split the string on comma or end string character matching the regex, like in this function:

private static List<String> splitByComma(String s) {
    List<String> output = new ArrayList<>();
    Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("([^\",]*\"[^\"]*\")*[^\",]*(,|$)");
    Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(s);
    while (matcher.find() && matcher.start() < s.length()) {
        output.add(s.substring(matcher.start(), (matcher.end() == s.length())?matcher.end():matcher.end() - 1));
    }
    return output;
}

Answer 3

Here is an approach that does not use regexps:

private static List<String> splitQuoted(String string) {
    List<String> res = new ArrayList<>();
    int idx = 0;
    int start = 0;
    boolean inQuote = false;
    while (idx < string.length()) {
        char ch = string.charAt(idx++);
        if (ch == '"') {
            inQuote = !inQuote;
        } else {
            if (ch == ',' && !inQuote) {
                res.add(string.substring(start, idx - 1));
                start = idx;
            }
        }
    }
    if (start != idx)
        res.add(string.substring(start));
    return res;
}

It should scale well as the input string grows, since it only ever looks forward. You could improve upon its efficiency further by using char[] arrays instead of String.charAt(), too. It also leaves the quote characters in the output values, but it would be fairly trivial to remove them as you go.

Answer 4

regex to achieve expected results:

String stringToSearch = "A,B,C,D,\"E,F\",G,H";
Pattern p1 = Pattern.compile("(?:[^\",]+|\"[^\"]+\")+");
Matcher m = p1.matcher(stringToSearch);
while (m.find())
{   
    System.out.println(m.group());
}

Answer 5

You can fix it by using replace();

String replaceString=s1.replace("\"","");//replaces all occurrences of "\"" to ""  

Then split .