Since Sun has deprecated Tokenizers, the following RegEx Java split on a comma separated string normally does the trick:
Java:
recipientsArr = recipientsStr.split("\\,");
However, what if you only want to split if commas are not inside quotes or double quotes? Hrmm... tricky.
For example, I want to split the following string to create 2 valid email addresses, not 3 invalid ones:
"Leon, J" <j@email.com>, "M" <j@email.com>
We'll need some fancy Regular Expression goodness. Trouble is, I am not that great with RegEx grammar. Luckily, Neal Ford is. Very good. In his tutorial about "Power" regexes, he has a great example on how to conditionally match a comma if it's not inside quotes:
RegEx:
,(?=([^']*'[^']*')*(?![^']*'))
So, all that's left is to change it to look for double quotes, and make sure the Java compiler escapes the quotes properly.
Final Solution:
recipientsArr = recipientsStr.split( ",(?=([^\"]*\"[^\"]*\")*(?![^\"]*\"))" );
Update:
I've recently found and posted another pattern that seems to work a bit better with some engines.
http://dev.notoptimal.net/2008/10/more-splitting.html
