Regex combination for parenthesis and commas

Question

I need help with forming the regex for reading a file following the structure:

2050206,"Abella, Jan Vincent P",BSECE,1,Male

How can I ignore the comma inside the double parenthesis? Thank you in advance

Answer 1

Here is an example of how to split on a comma by passing a regex to split .

The negative lookahead (?![^"]*"[^"]*$) prevents a comma being matched if there is only one " ahead in the line.

(?m) turns on MULTILINE mode so that $ matches the end of a line and not the end of the whole string.

public class Example {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String string = 
            "2050206,\"Abella, Jan Vincent P\",BSECE,1,Male\n" +
            "2050207,\"Theron, Charlize\",BSECE,2,Female";
        String regex = "(?m),(?![^\"]*\"[^\"]*$)";
        for (String s : string.split(regex)) {
            System.out.println(s);
        }
    }
}

Prints:

2050206
"Abella, Jan Vincent P"
BSECE
1
Male
2050207
"Theron, Charlize"
BSECE
2
Female