How do I split a string with multiple separators in lua?

Question

I want to split a string into an array divided by multiple delimiters.

local delim = {",", " ", "."}
local s = "a, b c .d e , f 10, M10 , 20,5"

Result table should look like this:

{"a", "b", "c", "d", "e",  "f", "10", "M10", "20", "5"}

Delimiters can be white spaces, commas or dots. If two delimiters like a white space and comma are coming after each other, they should be collapsed, additional whitespaces should be ignored.

lhf · Accepted Answer · 2016-11-16 21:49:12Z

5

This code splits the string as required by building a pattern of the complement of the delimiter set.

local delim = {",", " ", "."}
local s = "a, b c .d e , f 10, M10 , 20,5"
local p = "[^"..table.concat(delim).."]+"
for w in s:gmatch(p) do
        print(w)
end

Adapt the code to save the "words" in a table.

edited Nov 16, 2016 at 21:49

answered Nov 16, 2016 at 21:37

lhf

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3 Comments

Egor Skriptunoff Over a year ago

Do closing bracket ], percent % and dash - allowed to be among user-defined delimiters?

tonypdmtr Over a year ago

I normally use this function to avoid such problems: function escape_magic(s) local MAGIC_CHARS_SET = '[()%%.[^$%]*+%-?]' if s == nil then return end return (s:gsub(MAGIC_CHARS_SET,'%%%1')) end

Egor Skriptunoff Over a year ago

@tonypdmtr - Why not simply (s:gsub("%p", "%%%0")) ?

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