Enlightened ones, I'm trying to separate strings into 7 elements. The problem is if an element contains a space or is blank, it is surrounded by {}, so I can't split on spaces. There is no uniformity to which elements are enclosed by brackets.

Here are 3 lines of actual data as samples: 
aotone 1 {FixServer AOT1} FixServer {-F FxAOT1} {} 1
FxACH 2 achfxsvr FixServer {-F FxACH} routex 0
ESIS 2 {ESISAdministrative Server} java -Did=esisadmin routex 0

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My thought was to replace any spaces within brackets with dummy characters #%, split on spaces, discard brackets, then replace #% back with spaces. That would be a lot of work, and I'm sure there's a better way, I'm just too much of a noob to know what that is.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!

2005-09-13 Retitled by Arunbear, as per Monastery guidelines
Original title: 'There's gotta be a better way...'

In reply to Parsing spaces and curly braces by cochrasc

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