PHP and RegEx: Split a string by commas that are not inside brackets (and also nested brackets)

You can do that easier:

preg_match_all('/[^(,\s]+|\([^)]+\)/', $str, $matches)

But it would be better if you use a real parser. Maybe something like this:

$str = 'one, two, three, (four, (five, six), (ten)), seven';
$buffer = '';
$stack = array();
$depth = 0;
$len = strlen($str);
for ($i=0; $i<$len; $i++) {
    $char = $str[$i];
    switch ($char) {
    case '(':
        $depth++;
        break;
    case ',':
        if (!$depth) {
            if ($buffer !== '') {
                $stack[] = $buffer;
                $buffer = '';
            }
            continue 2;
        }
        break;
    case ' ':
        if (!$depth) {
            continue 2;
        }
        break;
    case ')':
        if ($depth) {
            $depth--;
        } else {
            $stack[] = $buffer.$char;
            $buffer = '';
            continue 2;
        }
        break;
    }
    $buffer .= $char;
}
if ($buffer !== '') {
    $stack[] = $buffer;
}
var_dump($stack);

Hm... OK already marked as answered, but since you asked for an easy solution I will try nevertheless:

$test = "one, two, three, , , ,(four, five, six), seven, (eight, nine)";
$split = "/([(].*?[)])|(\w)+/";
preg_match_all($split, $test, $out);
print_r($out[0]);              

Output

Array
(
    [0] => one
    [1] => two
    [2] => three
    [3] => (four, five, six)
    [4] => seven
    [5] => (eight, nine)
)

You can't, directly. You'd need, at minimum, variable-width lookbehind, and last I knew PHP's PCRE only has fixed-width lookbehind.

My first recommendation would be to first extract parenthesized expressions from the string. I don't know anything about your actual problem, though, so I don't know if that will be feasible.