parsings strings: extracting words and phrases [JavaScript]

A simple regular expression will do but leave the quotation marks. e.g.

'foo bar "lorem ipsum" baz'.match(/("[^"]*")|([^\s"]+)/g)
output:   ['foo', 'bar', '"lorem ipsum"', 'baz']

edit: beaten to it by shyamsundar, sorry for the double answer

var str = 'foo bar "lorem ipsum" baz';  
var results = str.match(/("[^"]+"|[^"\s]+)/g);

... returns the array you're looking for.
Note, however:

• Bounding quotes are included, so can be removed with replace(/^"([^"]+)"$/,"$1") on the results.
• Spaces between the quotes will stay intact. So, if there are three spaces between lorem and ipsum, they'll be in the result. You can fix this by running replace(/\s+/," ") on the results.
• If there's no closing " after ipsum (i.e. an incorrectly-quoted phrase) you'll end up with: ['foo', 'bar', 'lorem', 'ipsum', 'baz']

Try this:

var input = 'foo bar "lorem ipsum" baz';
var R =  /(\w|\s)*\w(?=")|\w+/g;
var output = input.match(R);

output is ["foo", "bar", "lorem ipsum", "baz"]

Note there are no extra double quotes around lorem ipsum

Although it assumes the input has the double quotes in the right place:

var input2 = 'foo bar lorem ipsum" baz'; var output2 = input2.match(R);
var input3 = 'foo bar "lorem ipsum baz'; var output3 = input3.match(R);

output2 is ["foo bar lorem ipsum", "baz"]
output3 is ["foo", "bar", "lorem", "ipsum", "baz"]

And won't handle escaped double quotes (is that a problem?):

var input4 = 'foo b\"ar  bar\" \"bar "lorem ipsum" baz';
var output4 = input4.match(R);

output4 is  ["foo b", "ar bar", "bar", "lorem ipsum", "baz"]