[Javascript] RegExp for parsing search strings

[paul at juniperwebcraft.com (Paul Novitski)]

At 03:19 PM 4/28/2006, Scott Reynen wrote:
>On Apr 28, 2006, at 4:22 PM, Paul Novitski wrote:
>
>>My first attempt was something like this:
>>
>>         /((\"[^\"]+\")|( [^ ]+ ))+/
>>
>>one or more
>>         (quotes surrounding one or more non-quote characters)
>>or
>>         (spaces surrounding one or more non-space characters)
>
>The following seems to work in PHP:
>
><?
>
>         $text = 'one "two three" " four " five six';
>
>         preg_match_all( '#(?:"([^"]+)")|([^ ]+)#' , $text , $matches );
>
>         echo( '<pre>' );
>         print_r( $matches );
>         echo( '</pre>' );


*Bonk*  Scott, thanks for making me realize that I was barking up the 
wrong tree.  I was using preg_split() instead of 
preg_match_all().  preg_split() finds delimiters and preg_match_all() 
finds the words themselves.

Both your and my regular expressions work with preg_match_all():
http://juniperwebcraft.com/test/preg_split_Reynen01.php
http://juniperwebcraft.com/test/preg_split_Novitski01.php

but not with preg_split().  My own RegExp gives at least a partial 
result with preg_split() but that's probably coincidence; I need to 
start from scratch.

Regards,
Paul