Javascript String Splitting

Question

So if I have a string like:

'boss: "Person 1" AND occupation: "Engineer"'

Is there a way I can split the string into an array like such:

['boss:', '"Person 1"', 'AND', 'occupation:', '"Engineer"']

I have lots of different regex splits and multiple argument splits and I can't seem to achieve this. Any ideas?

FYI: yes I would like to leave in the quotations surrounding Person 1 and Engineer and maintain the spaces in whatever is between quotations

Thanks!

• Cruiser: what have you tried? where are you stuck?

Answer 1

var input = 'boss: "Person 1" AND occupation: "Engineer"';
console.log(input.match(/"[^"]*"|[^ ]+/g));
// Output:
// [ 'boss:', '"Person 1"', 'AND', 'occupation:', '"Engineer"' ]

Explanation

You want to match two kinds of things:

1. Things without spaces in them (since spaces separate terms).
2. Things in quotes (where spaces are allowed).

The regular expression here consists of two parts:

1. "[^"]*" - This matches a double quote, followed by any number of non-double-quote characters, followed by another double quote.
2. [^ ]+ - This matches one or more non-space characters.

The two are combined with a pipe (|), which means "or." Together, they match both types of things you want to find.

• user94559: Another answer here pointed out that the first part of the regular expression could be ".*?" instead. I think that's perfectly fine too.

Answer 2

If console.log prints an array, it surrounds each string element with apostrophes, so you see the apostrophes only in console output.

If you want to get a string formatted the way you want, use the following script:

var str = 'boss: "Person 1" AND occupation: "Engineer"';
var pat = /"[^"]+"|\S+/g;
var res1 = str.match(pat);
var result = "['" + res1.join("', '") + "']";