Java – a regular expression used to split strings separated by | when not enclosed in double quotes

I need a regular expression to calculate the number of columns in the pipeline delimited string in Java

For example:

"1234"|"Name"||"Some description with ||| in it"|"Last Column"

The above contents shall be counted as 5 columns, including an empty column after the "name" column

thank you

Solution

This is a method:

String input =
    "\"1234\"|\"Name\"||\"Some description with ||| in it\"|\"Last Column\"";
//  \_______/ \______/\/\_________________________________/ \_____________/    
//      1        2    3                 4                          5

int cols = input.replaceAll("\"[^\"]*\"","")  // remove "..."
                .replaceAll("[^|]","")        // remove anything else than |
                .length() + 1;                 // Count the remaining |,add 1

System.out.println(cols);   // 5

IMO is not very powerful For example, if you plan to handle escaped quotes, I recommend not using regular expressions