Parse string into array based on spaces or “double quotes strings”

Question

Im trying to take a user input string and parse is into an array called char *entire_line[100]; where each word is put at a different index of the array but if a part of the str

Answer 1

I think the answer to your question is actually fairly simple, but I'm taking on an assumption where it seems the other responses have taken a different one. I'm assuming that you want any quoted block of text to be separated out on its own regardless of spacing with the rest of the text being separated by spaces.

So given the example:

"some text in quotes" plus four simple words p"lus something strange"

The output would be:

[0] some text in quotes

[1] plus

[2] four

[3] simple

[4] words

[5] p

[6] lus something strange

Given that this is the case, only a simple bit of code is required, and no complex machines. You would first check if there is a leading quote for the first character and if so tick a flag and remove the character. As well as removing any quotes at the end of the string. Then tokenize the string based on quotation marks. Then tokenize every other of the strings obtained previously by spaces. Tokenize starting with the first string obtained if there was no leading quote, or the second string obtained if there was a leading quote. Then each of the remaining strings from the first part will be added to an array of strings interspersed with the strings from the second part added in place of the strings they were tokenized from. In this way you can get the result listed above. In code this would look like:

#include
#include

char ** parser(char * input, char delim, char delim2){
    char ** output;
    char ** quotes;
    char * line = input;
    int flag = 0;
    if(strlen(input) > 0 && input[0] == delim){
        flag = 1;
        line = input + 1;
    }
    int i = 0;
    char * pch = strchr(line, delim);
    while(pch != NULL){
        i++;
        pch = strchr(pch+1, delim);
    }
    quotes = (char **) malloc(sizeof(char *)*i+1);
    char * token = strtok(input, delim);
    int n = 0;
    while(token != NULL){
        quotes[n] = strdup(token);
        token = strtok(NULL, delim);
        n++;
    }
    if(delim2 != NULL){
        int j = 0, k = 0, l = 0;
        for(n = 0; n < i+1; n++){
            if(flag & n % 2 == 1 || !flag & n % 2 == 0){
                char ** new = parser(delim2, NULL);
                l = sizeof(new)/sizeof(char *);
                for(k = 0; k < l; k++){
                    output[j] = new[k];
                    j++;
                }
                for(k = l; k > -1; k--){
                    free(new[n]);
                }
                free(new);
            } else {
                output[j] = quotes[n];
                j++;
            }
        }
        for(n = i; n > -1; n--){
            free(quotes[n]);
        }
        free(quotes);
    } else {
        return quotes;
    }
    return output;
}

int main(){
    char * input;
    char ** result = parser(input, '\"', ' ');

    return 0;
}

(May not be perfect, I haven't tested it)