Regex to pick characters outside of pair of quotes

Question

I would like to find a regex that will pick out all commas that fall outside quote sets.

For example:

\'foo\' => \'bar\',
\'foofoo\' => \'bar,         


        

Answer 1

MarkusQ's answer worked great for me for about a year, until it didn't. I just got a stack overflow error on a line with about 120 commas and 3682 characters total. In Java, like this:

        String[] cells = line.split("[\t,](?=(?:[^\"]|\"[^\"]*\")*$)", -1);

Here's my extremely inelegant replacement that doesn't stack overflow:

private String[] extractCellsFromLine(String line) {
    List cellList = new ArrayList();
    while (true) {
        String[] firstCellAndRest;
        if (line.startsWith("\"")) {
            firstCellAndRest = line.split("([\t,])(?=(?:[^\"]|\"[^\"]*\")*$)", 2);
        }
        else {
            firstCellAndRest = line.split("[\t,]", 2);                
        }
        cellList.add(firstCellAndRest[0]);
        if (firstCellAndRest.length == 1) {
            break;
        }
        line = firstCellAndRest[1];
    }
    return cellList.toArray(new String[cellList.size()]);
}