split string in javascript with regex?

Question

I have the following string in javascript,

Id:121,RefId:123,Date:Sep 22, 2012 12:00:00 AM 

when i tried to split it into 3 key,value pairs using , as the separator it is giving me wrong out put because in date there is another ,(comma).
So i guess i must use regular expression.
I want to display it as follows;

Id:121 
RefId:123 
Date:Sep 22, 2012 12:00:00 AM 

Can anyone please suggest how to overcome the extra comma in date using regular expression?
Thanks in Advance...

• Joey: "Some people, when faced with a problem think ‘I know; I use regular expressions’. Now they have two problems."
• Bergi: How did you got such a string? Its ambiguous format is not easy to handle. Why don't you use JSON, CSV or such?
• Tim Pietzcker: @Joey: As both our failed attempts to do it without regexes show, sometimes not using a regex causes more problems :)
• Joey: Tim: Indeed. Still, the point holds in most cases :-)

Answer 1

You mean split on the , which is followed not the white space?

'Id:121,RefId:123,Date:Sep 22, 2012 12:00:00 AM '.split(/,(?=\S)/);
// will give you ["Id:121", "RefId:123", "Date:Sep 22, 2012 12:00:00 AM "]

Answer 2

if you really want a regular expression (instead of a limited split) you could do this:

var text = "Id:121,RefId:123,Date:Sep 22, 2012 12:00:00 AM";
text.match(/^(.+?),(.+?),(.+)$/);

• Tim Pietzcker: You could use [^,]* instead of .+?, that would be a bit more efficient.
• GottZ: [^,] or .+? would not make any difference in assembly but you can choose what you want.
• xdazz: @Jan-StefanJanetzky I think Tim means the difference of performance.
• GottZ: it would only make a performance difference if there would be more than one char in [^]
• Tim Pietzcker: No, that's not correct. Your regex, applied to the test string, takes the regex engine 49 steps until a match is achieved instead of 10 steps that my regex would take. By making the + quantifier lazy, you force the regex engine to backtrack after each character. This is even worse if the input string cannot be matched. If I take out the second and third comma from the string, your regex takes 248 steps to figure out a non-match, mine takes 8.

Answer 3

If you would like to use a regular expression, you can try this:

re = /^Id:(\d+),RefId:(\d+),Date:(.+)/
matches = re.exec("Id:121,RefId:123,Date:Sep 22, 2012 12:00:00 AM")
matches[1] // "121"
matches[2] // "123"
matches[3] // "Sep 22, 2012 12:00:00 AM"