Regex help: Split string into words AND double-quoted phrases

[Robert Oschler]

Can someone give me a regex expression that will split a sentence containing
words and double-quoted phrases, into an array? I don't want the words
between the double-quotes to be split using the space (or comma) character
as a delimiter. I can do one or the other, tokenize the words or tokenize
the double-quoted strings, but I can't figure out how to combine the two
into the same regex expression. Note: I *do* want to capture (retain) the
double-quotes.

For example:

dogs cats and "other things".

I want:

1>dogs
2>cats
3>and
4>"other things"

not:

1>dogs
2>cats
3>and
4>"other
5>things"

Thanks.

[Baconbutty]

Here is a rough go - still needs some work.

Use the "|" union operator.

The key I think is to put the expression for the "text in quotes" first
in the union, so that the RegExp parser will grab that if it finds it
first.

function fTest()
{
var s='One two "three four" five six';

var r=/(\"[^"]*\"|\w+)/g;

s=s.replace(r," $1|");

a=s.split("|");

alert(a);
}

[peterS.]

hi Robert,
Robert Oschler wrote:

Can someone give me a regex expression that will split a sentence containing
words and double-quoted phrases, into an array?
...

how about this one?

var str = "dogs, cat and \"other things\".";
var regX = /("[^"]+")|(\b\w+\b )/g;
var arr = str.match(regX) ;
alert((typeof arr.toSource == "function") ? (arr.toSource() ) : (arr));
so long - peterS.