I get what you want now. Its not simple what you ask. I remember reading about it in Jeffrey Friedl book about regex. Here is a link that may help you http://groups.google.com/groups?q=regular%20expression%20split%20ignore%20inside%20quote&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&client=opera&rls=en&sa=N&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&tab=wg In the n1 tool regexbuddy there is also this snippet : ("[^"\r\n]*")?,(?![^",\r\n]*"$) The capturing group makes sure delimiters between double quotes are ignored. The negative lookahead makes sure delimiters between double quotes in the last field are ignored.

arjun, You should probably move this over the the regex advice forums. You will get more help if you post your question in the forums than you will here. Brendan

You can give this pattern a try I believe it will do what you want. string pattern = @" (?:^| ) # Element begins with the string begining or space (? (?(OPEN) # If quotes are open Then (""(?<-OPEN>)|.) # Match any char and if a quote then close | # Else (""(?)|[^ ]) # Match any char except the delimter and if quote then open )+ # Match one or more such chars ) (?: |$) # Element ends with space or string ending"; int ci = 0; foreach (Match m in Regex.Matches(input, pattern, RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace)) Console.WriteLine("{0}: [{1}]", ci++, m.Value);