Split string on spaces in Java, except if between quotes (i.e. treat \"hello world\" as one token) [duplicate]

Here's how:

String str = "Location \"Welcome  to india\" Bangalore " +
             "Channai \"IT city\"  Mysore";

List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
Matcher m = Pattern.compile("([^\"]\\S*|\".+?\")\\s*").matcher(str);
while (m.find())
    list.add(m.group(1)); // Add .replace("\"", "") to remove surrounding quotes.


System.out.println(list);

Output:

[Location, "Welcome  to india", Bangalore, Channai, "IT city", Mysore]

The regular expression simply says

• [^"]     - token starting with something other than "
• \S*       - followed by zero or more non-space characters
• ...or...
• ".+?"   - a "-symbol followed by whatever, until another ".