Split a string containing command-line parameters into a String[] in Java

If you need to support only UNIX-like OSes, there is an even better solution. Unlike Commandline from ant, ArgumentTokenizer from DrJava is more sh-like: it supports escapes!

Seriously, even something insane like sh -c 'echo "\"un'\''kno\"wn\$\$\$'\'' with \$\"\$\$. \"zzz\""' gets properly tokenized into [bash, -c, echo "\"un'kno\"wn\$\$\$' with \$\"\$\$. \"zzz\""] (By the way, when run, this command outputs "un'kno"wn$$$' with $"$$. "zzz").

You should use a fully featured modern object oriented Command Line Argument Parser I suggest my favorite Java Simple Argument Parser. And how to use JSAP, this is using Groovy as an example, but it is the same for straight Java. There is also args4j which is in some ways more modern than JSAP because it uses annotations, stay away from the apache.commons.cli stuff, it is old and busted and very procedural and un-Java-eques in its API. But I still fall back on JSAP because it is so easy to build your own custom argument handlers.

There are lots of default Parsers for URLs, Numbers, InetAddress, Color, Date, File, Class, and it is super easy to add your own.

For example here is a handler to map args to Enums:

import com.martiansoftware.jsap.ParseException;
import com.martiansoftware.jsap.PropertyStringParser;

/*
This is a StringParser implementation that maps a String to an Enum instance using Enum.valueOf()
 */
public class EnumStringParser extends PropertyStringParser
{
    public Object parse(final String s) throws ParseException
    {
        try
        {
            final Class klass = Class.forName(super.getProperty("klass"));
            return Enum.valueOf(klass, s.toUpperCase());
        }
        catch (ClassNotFoundException e)
        {
            throw new ParseException(super.getProperty("klass") + " could not be found on the classpath");
        }
    }
}

and I am not a fan of configuration programming via XML, but JSAP has a really nice way to declare options and settings outside your code, so your code isn't littered with hundreds of lines of setup that clutters and obscures the real functional code, see my link on how to use JSAP for an example, less code than any of the other libraries I have tried.

This is a direction solution to your problem as clarified in your update, the lines in your "script" file are still command lines. Read them in from the file line by line and call JSAP.parse(String);.

I use this technique to provide "command line" functionality to web apps all the time. One particular use was in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game with a Director/Flash front end that we enabled executing "commands" from the chat like and used JSAP on the back end to parse them and execute code based on what it parsed. Very much like what you are wanting to do, except you read the "commands" from a file instead of a socket. I would ditch joptsimple and just use JSAP, you will really get spoiled by its powerful extensibility.

/**
 * [code borrowed from ant.jar]
 * Crack a command line.
 * @param toProcess the command line to process.
 * @return the command line broken into strings.
 * An empty or null toProcess parameter results in a zero sized array.
 */
public static String[] translateCommandline(String toProcess) {
    if (toProcess == null || toProcess.length() == 0) {
        //no command? no string
        return new String[0];
    }
    // parse with a simple finite state machine

    final int normal = 0;
    final int inQuote = 1;
    final int inDoubleQuote = 2;
    int state = normal;
    final StringTokenizer tok = new StringTokenizer(toProcess, "\"\' ", true);
    final ArrayList<String> result = new ArrayList<String>();
    final StringBuilder current = new StringBuilder();
    boolean lastTokenHasBeenQuoted = false;

    while (tok.hasMoreTokens()) {
        String nextTok = tok.nextToken();
        switch (state) {
        case inQuote:
            if ("\'".equals(nextTok)) {
                lastTokenHasBeenQuoted = true;
                state = normal;
            } else {
                current.append(nextTok);
            }
            break;
        case inDoubleQuote:
            if ("\"".equals(nextTok)) {
                lastTokenHasBeenQuoted = true;
                state = normal;
            } else {
                current.append(nextTok);
            }
            break;
        default:
            if ("\'".equals(nextTok)) {
                state = inQuote;
            } else if ("\"".equals(nextTok)) {
                state = inDoubleQuote;
            } else if (" ".equals(nextTok)) {
                if (lastTokenHasBeenQuoted || current.length() != 0) {
                    result.add(current.toString());
                    current.setLength(0);
                }
            } else {
                current.append(nextTok);
            }
            lastTokenHasBeenQuoted = false;
            break;
        }
    }
    if (lastTokenHasBeenQuoted || current.length() != 0) {
        result.add(current.toString());
    }
    if (state == inQuote || state == inDoubleQuote) {
        throw new RuntimeException("unbalanced quotes in " + toProcess);
    }
    return result.toArray(new String[result.size()]);
}

Expanding on Andreas_D's answer, instead of copying, use CommandLineUtils.translateCommandline(String toProcess) from the excellent Plexus Common Utilities library.

I use the Java Getopt port to do it.