How Can I Explode a String with Embedded Quotations, Including Escaped and Percent-Encoded Quotes?

Exploding Strings with Embedded Quotations

Exploding a string using the standard explode() function can be problematic when dealing with text within quotation marks. To achieve the desired result of treating quoted words as single entities, a more sophisticated approach is required.

Using Regular Expressions

Regular expressions provide a powerful solution for this task. The following regex matches quoted strings allowing for escaped quotes:

"(?:\.|[^\"])*"|\S+

This pattern can be used with preg_match_all() to extract both quoted and non-quoted words from the string:

$text = 'Lorem ipsum "dolor sit amet" consectetur "adipiscing \"elit" dolor';
preg_match_all('/"(?:\.|[^\"])*"|\S+/', $text, $matches);

The resulting array will contain the desired output:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => Lorem
            [1] => ipsum
            [2] => "dolor sit amet"
            [3] => consectetur
            [4] => "adipiscing \"elit"
            [5] => dolor
        )
)

Explanation

The regex pattern consists of two parts:

• Quoted strings: Enclosed in double quotes, it allows for escaped quotes using \.
• Non-quoted words: Matches any sequence of non-whitespace characters.

The non-capture group (?:...) ensures that the escaped quotes are not captured as separate matches.

Handling Percent-Encoded Quotes

If your string contains percent-encoded quotes instead of double quotes, modify the regex to:

%22(?:\.|(?!%22).)*%22|\S+

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