Is it possible to split a string by comma but not by comma whitespace

Question

I'm going trough old poorly designed comma separated data. For the most part each "section" is correctly separated by a comma:

string old_data = data_for_section_1,data_for_section_2,IDs|in|section|3

That is different for section 4, whose data is "comma white space" separated:

string old_data = data_for_section_1,data_for_section_2,IDs|in|section|3,section_4_part_1, section_4_part_2, section_4_part_3,data_for_section_5

Is it at all possible to get and feed the 5 sections into an array, and not end up with 7 items in that array?

Answer 1

I believe the following should work:

var data = Regex.Split(old_data, @",(?!\s)");

An example of this is here .