Posted by Chung Leong on 09/30/61 11:37

Tony Marston wrote:
> I am seeking help with a regular expression that will split a string into
> several parts with ',' (comma) as the separator, but NOT where the separator
> is enclosed in parentheses. For example, take the string "field1,
> CONCAT(field2,' ', field3) as field23, field4". I would like to be able to
> split this into the following:
> [0] field1
> [1] CONCAT(field2,' ', field3) as field23
> [2] field4
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> --
> Tony Marston
> http://www.tonymarston.net

This works for the text format you described. Doesn't work in
situations where you might have paraphrases inside literal strings. For
that you'd need a solution like that one Pedro suggested.

preg_match_all('/\s*([^,]*\(.+[^\)]\)[^,]*|[^,]+)\s*/', $text, $m);
$list = $m[1];

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