Explode white spaces in a string excluding what's inside quotes

Question

I can't figure out how to explode white spaces in a string excluding what's inside quotes. I have found several regular expressions that can do the job, but the particularity here is that the quotes are preceded by an equal sign:

string = 'arg1="value1" arg2="value2" arg3="value3 value4 value5"';

I was able to isolate what's contained inside the quotes, but I can't get the complete pair arg1="value1 value2"

Thanks for your help.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/317053/regular-expression-for-extracting-tag-attributes — nice ass, Dec 23 '13 at 13:11
`arg1="value1 value2"` <- there's no logic behind getting that anyway...? — Niels Keurentjes, Dec 23 '13 at 13:13
In this example there's no logic indeed, but I use it to pass a label which can contain multiple words. In this case this becomes useful. — Julien, Dec 24 '13 at 03:06

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 23 '13 at 13:12

$test = 'arg1="value1" arg2="value2" arg3="value3 value4 value5"';
preg_match_all('#([a-zA-Z0-9]+)="([^"]+)"#', $test, $matches);
var_dump($matches);

Returns:

array(3) {
  [0]=>
  array(3) {
    [0]=>
    string(13) "arg1="value1""
    [1]=>
    string(13) "arg2="value2""
    [2]=>
    string(27) "arg3="value3 value4 value5""
  }
  [1]=>
  array(3) {
    [0]=>
    string(4) "arg1"
    [1]=>
    string(4) "arg2"
    [2]=>
    string(4) "arg3"
  }
  [2]=>
  array(3) {
    [0]=>
    string(6) "value1"
    [1]=>
    string(6) "value2"
    [2]=>
    string(20) "value3 value4 value5"
  }
}

Sample here.

Mine is about the same `'~\w+(?:="[^"]+")~'` a bit shorter. – Jonny 5 Dec 23 '13 at 13:29 — Jonny 5, Dec 23 '13 at 13:29

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 23 '13 at 13:16

0

Try This

<?php
$string = 'arg1="value1" arg2="value2" arg3="value3 value4 value5"';
$whitespacearray= explode(" ",$string);
print_r($whitespacearray);
?>

answered Dec 23 '13 at 13:16

Manish Patel

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Explode white spaces in a string excluding what's inside quotes

2 Answers2