String Tokenizer : split string by comma and ignore comma in double quotes

Question

I have a string like below -

value1, value2, value3, value4, \"value5, 1234\", value6, value7, \"value8\", value9, \"value10, 123.23\"

Answer 1

Use a CSV parser like OpenCSV to take care of things like commas in quoted elements, values that span multiple lines etc. automatically. You can use the library to serialize your text back as CSV as well.

String str = "value1, value2, value3, value4, \"value5, 1234\", " +
        "value6, value7, \"value8\", value9, \"value10, 123.23\"";

CSVReader reader = new CSVReader(new StringReader(str));

String [] tokens;
while ((tokens = reader.readNext()) != null) {
    System.out.println(tokens[0]); // value1
    System.out.println(tokens[4]); // value5, 1234
    System.out.println(tokens[9]); // value10, 123.23
}