How to split a string by white space or comma?
JavascriptJavascript Problem Overview
If I try
"my, tags are, in here".split(" ,")
I get the following
[ 'my, tags are, in here' ]
Whereas I want
['my', 'tags', 'are', 'in', 'here']
Javascript Solutions
Solution 1 - Javascript
String.split() can also accept a regular expression:
input.split(/[ ,]+/);
This particular regex splits on a sequence of one or more commas or spaces, so that e.g. multiple consecutive spaces or a comma+space sequence do not produce empty elements in the results.
Solution 2 - Javascript
you can use regex in order to catch any length of white space, and this would be like:
var text = "hoi how are you";
var arr = text.split(/\s+/);
console.log(arr) // will result : ["hoi", "how", "are", "you"]
console.log(arr[2]) // will result : "are"
Solution 3 - Javascript
The suggestion to use .split(/[ ,]+/) is good, but with natural sentences sooner or later you'll end up getting empty elements in the array. e.g. ['foo', '', 'bar'].
Which is fine if that's okay for your use case. But if you want to get rid of the empty elements you can do:
var str = 'whatever your text is...';
str.split(/[ ,]+/).filter(Boolean);
Solution 4 - Javascript
"my, tags are, in here".split(/[ ,]+/)
the result is :
["my", "tags", "are", "in", "here"]
Solution 5 - Javascript
input.split(/\s*[\s,]\s*/)
… \s* matches zero or more white space characters (not just spaces, but also tabs and newlines).
... [\s,] matches one white space character or one comma
Solution 6 - Javascript
When I want to take into account extra characters like your commas (in my case each token may be entered with quotes), I'd do a string.replace() to change the other delimiters to blanks and then split on whitespace.
Solution 7 - Javascript
When you need to split a string with some single char delimiters, consider using a reverse logic: match chunks of strings that consist of chars other than the delimiter chars.
So, to extract all chunks of chars other than whitespace (matched with \s) and commas, you can use
console.log("my, tags are, in here".match(/[^\s,]+/g))
// => ["my","tags","are","in","here"]
See the regex demo. String#match extracts all non-overlapping occurrences of one or more (+) chars other than whitespace and comma ([^\s,]).