Out of the box, you can't split an NSString by matching a RegEx pattern. I found RegExKit Lite on SourceForge and threw the old RegEx at it. Unfortunately, the pattern matching was not reliable. But folks speak highly of this framework, and it's BSD, so I needed to give it a good try before moving on.
I am not sure if it is was a problem with RegExKit or the fact that it is ICU and not PCRE based... but I went looking for another pattern that would work. I must have tried a dozen before I found Programmer's Heaven's solution. The pattern is actually simpler and works perfectly on NSStrings with RegExKitLite v 2.1.
The original posted by Jonathan was :
,(?!(?:[^",]|[^"],[^"])+") And with the double quotes escaped and ready for NSString CSV duty it looks like this:
