Regex to split and ignore brackets

Question

I need to split by comma in the text but the text also has a comma inside brackets which need to be ignored

Input text : Selectroasted peanuts, Sugars (sugar, fancymolasses) ,Hydrogenatedvegetable oil (cottonseed and rapeseed oil),Salt.

Expected output:

• Selectroasted peanuts
• Sugars (sugar, fancymolasses)
• Hydrogenatedvegetable oil (cottonseed and rapeseed oil)
• Salt

MyCode

string pattern = @"\s*(?:""[^""]*""|\([^)]*\)|[^, ]+)";
string input = "Selectroasted peanuts,Sugars (sugar, fancymolasses),Hydrogenatedvegetable oil (cottonseed and rapeseed oil),Salt."; 
foreach (Match m in Regex.Matches(input, pattern)) 
{ 
Console.WriteLine("{0}", m.Value); 
}

The output I am getting:

• Selectroasted
• peanuts
• Sugars
• (sugar, fancymolasses)
• Hydrogenatedvegetable
• oil
• (cottonseed and rapeseed oil)
• Salt

Please help.

Answer 1

You can use

string pattern = @"(?:""[^""]*""|\([^()]*\)|[^,])+";
string input = "Selectroasted peanuts,Sugars (sugar, fancymolasses),Hydrogenatedvegetable oil (cottonseed and rapeseed oil),Salt."; 
foreach (Match m in Regex.Matches(input.TrimEnd(new[] {'!', '?', '.', '…'}), pattern)) 
{ 
    Console.WriteLine("{0}", m.Value); 
}
// => Selectroasted peanuts
//    Sugars (sugar, fancymolasses)
//    Hydrogenatedvegetable oil (cottonseed and rapeseed oil)
//    Salt

See the C# demo . See the regex demo , too. It matches one or more occurrences of

• "[^"]*" - " , zero or more chars other than " and then a "
• | - or
• \\([^()]*\\) - a ( , then any zero or more chars other than ( and ) and then a ) char
• | - or
• [^,] - a char other than a , .

Note the .TrimEnd(new[] {'!', '?', '.', '…'}) part in the code snippet is meant to remove the trailing sentence punctuation, but if you can affort Salt. in the output, you can remove that part.