Java: splitting a comma-separated string but ignoring commas in quotes

Question

I have a string vaguely like this:

foo,bar,c;qual=\"baz,blurb\",d;junk=\"quux,syzygy\"

that I want to split by commas -- but I need to igno

Answer 1

I was impatient and chose not to wait for answers... for reference it doesn't look that hard to do something like this (which works for my application, I don't need to worry about escaped quotes, as the stuff in quotes is limited to a few constrained forms):

final static private Pattern splitSearchPattern = Pattern.compile("[\",]"); 
private List splitByCommasNotInQuotes(String s) {
    if (s == null)
        return Collections.emptyList();

    List list = new ArrayList();
    Matcher m = splitSearchPattern.matcher(s);
    int pos = 0;
    boolean quoteMode = false;
    while (m.find())
    {
        String sep = m.group();
        if ("\"".equals(sep))
        {
            quoteMode = !quoteMode;
        }
        else if (!quoteMode && ",".equals(sep))
        {
            int toPos = m.start(); 
            list.add(s.substring(pos, toPos));
            pos = m.end();
        }
    }
    if (pos < s.length())
        list.add(s.substring(pos));
    return list;
}

(exercise for the reader: extend to handling escaped quotes by looking for backslashes also.)