I am doing a little parsing, and I want to do a multi-pass split on a piece of data. The first split will be on whitespace, on the idea that anything separated by whitespace is guaranteed to be a separate token. However, tokens may also be not separated by whitespace (ooh, the abuse to grammar). For example, if my input were:

"x:= y + z;" <-- gotta love the pascal reference

Then the tokens woule be x, :=, y, +, z, and ;. (Btw, I'm not actually parsing pascal, but I just wanted to use something most people would probably recognize/understand).

But if I split on whitespace, the contents of my array would be:

( "x:=", "y", "+", "z;" )

So I need to run a second split on each element of the array, in such a fashion that it will split the letters/numbers from the punctuation (or at least I think that's what I need to do, but I'm not dedicated to the idea philosophically--if someone comes up with a one pass solution, I'll be perfectly happy to use it).

A few wrinkles
  1. Since this is a parse, I need to preserve the order. "x" must come before ":=", but both must stay before "y".
  2. I need to be able to specify the specific types of punctuation I want to split on. So hello(there) must become "hello", "(", "there", ")", but hello/there/local/bin must remain a single token. If anyone knows how I can pull this off, I will be highly impressed.

Thank you all yet again.

Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge, others just gargle.

In reply to Splitting inside an array by DeusVult

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