Split string on spaces in Java, except if between quotes (i.e. treat "hello world" as one token)

Question

This question already has answers here:

Answer 1

Here's how:

String str = "Location "Welcome  to india" Bangalore " +
             "Channai "IT city"  Mysore";

List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
Matcher m = Pattern.compile("([^"]\S*|".+?")\s*").matcher(str);
while (m.find())
    list.add(m.group(1)); // Add .replace(""", "") to remove surrounding quotes.


System.out.println(list);

Output:

[Location, "Welcome  to india", Bangalore, Channai, "IT city", Mysore]

The regular expression simply says

• [^"]     - token starting with something other than "
• S*       - followed by zero or more non-space characters
• ...or...
• ".+?"   - a "-symbol followed by whatever, until another ".