Regex for splitting a string using space when not surrounded by single or double quotes

Question

I\'m new to regular expressions and would appreciate your help. I\'m trying to put together an expression that will split the example string using all spaces that are not s

Answer 1

If you want to allow escaped quotes inside the string, you can use something like this:

(?:(['"])(.*?)(?\\\\)*\1|([^\s]+))

Quoted strings will be group 2, single unquoted words will be group 3.

You can try it on various strings here: http://www.fileformat.info/tool/regex.htm or http://gskinner.com/RegExr/