First of all ... I am new to regex

I need to split a comma-seperated given string. The problem for me is that the values themselves contain both quotes and comma characters.

This is the given string:

allTfs = 'normalTradesFilter,"Trade,Filter,with,commas",TradeFilterWithoutCommas,TradeFilter"with"Quotes,"Trade,Filter\"With,Both\""'

These should be the results

tf1 = 'normalTradesFilter'

tf2 = 'Trade,Filter,with,commas'

tf3 = 'TradeFilterWithoutCommas'

tf4 = 'TradeFilter"with"Quotes'

tf5 = 'Trade,Filter\"With,Both\"'

How to specify the regex expression? Thanks for any help.

best wishes, thomas

As requested in the Posting Guidelines, please specific the programming language/Application you are working with.

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Michael

"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
Albert Einstein

Please be careful with your samples - the first item begins with a single quote but does not have one at the end (but your required output does); the second example uses double quote characters but the corresponding output shows single quotes.

Also how are the single/double quote characters escaped with used within items that have the same quote characters? Is it always a leading "\" or are there other ways of showing this?

Do you mean "split" or do you mean "match" as these are quite different operations for a regex? A "split" means you specify what lies between the items, where as a "match" means you specify the items themselves. In your case, a "split" would concentrate on the commas and determine if a comma is within a quoted strung or not, whereas a "match" would concentrate on what makes up a valid value and the fact that the are separated by commas is (almost) irrelevant - you could just as easily have tabs, spaces or semicolons as delimiters.

Susan