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

The regex from Jan Goyvaerts is the best solution I found so far, but creates also empty (null) matches, which he excludes in his program. These empty matches also appear from regex testers (e.g. rubular.com). If you turn the searches arround (first look for the quoted parts and than the space separed words) then you might do it in once with:

("[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[\S]+)+