How do you split by comma everything that is outside of brackets with regex in javascript?-CodePudding

I need to separate a string by commas except what is inside square brackets

Example

Dog[Food, Toys], Cat[Movies, brush]

I want to get

"Dog[Food,Toys]","Cat[Movies,Brush]"]

Thanks

CodePudding user response：

You can use below Regex to spilt the string. This regex finds any comma after closing square bracket.

,(?<=],)

Test link

CodePudding user response：

A more reliable and also whitespace aware approach which especially takes heothesennoc's comment on Rajesh's solution ...

"This won't work if there exists an item without brackets, e.g. Dog, Cat[Movies, Brush], Horse[Stable] – heothesennoc"

... into account has to feature a full lookaround, a negative lookbehind and a negative lookahead.

The pattern would be as follows ... (?<![[^]] )\s*,\s*(?!]). A description is provided with the link.

// see ... [https://regex101.com/r/yhyMOw/2]
const regXSplit = /(?<!\[[^\]] )\s*,\s*(?!\])/;

console.log([

  'Dog[Food, Toys], Fish,Cat[Movies, brush] ,Hamster[Litter, Food, Toys]',
  'Dog[Food, Toys],Bird, Cat[Movies, brush], Hamster[Litter, Food, Toys]',
  'Dog[Food, Toys],Mouse,Cat[Movies, brush] , Hamster[Litter, Food, Toys]',
  'Dog[Food, Toys] ,Horse, Cat[Movies, brush],Hamster[Litter, Food, Toys]',

].map(str => str.split(regXSplit)));

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