Regular Expression to Split String based on space and matching quotes in java

Question

I have a String which i need to split based on the space and the exact matching quotes.

If the

string = \"It is fun \\\"to write\\\" regular\\\"expressi         


        

Answer 1

The trick is to use a flexible look ahead to assert that:

• if there's an even number of quotes in the input, there should be an even number following the space, because an odd number means the space is within quotes
• if there's an odd number of quotes in the input, there should be an odd number following the space, because an even number means the space is within quotes

I got it into one line, but it's a whopper:

String[] parts = str.split("(\\s+|(?

This correctly splits the example string with or without the trailing quote (whether or not the trailing term includes a space).