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How to parse a certain column from a CSV string using Regular Expressions

2008-06-17, on 15:54 | In computer science | 3 Comments | Dieser Artikel in Deutsch

I need to parse the string below using regular expressions. Yes, it must be a regular expression.

"123","06/16/2008","","123456","1","1234","This is a title string","4.99","USD","","","","kozen@kozen.de","HK","Hong Kong","210000D1","Individual String","Site string","Moep","","Not required","","","","","","kozen","the bozen","da kozl street 23","","kozmode","12345","23232323232323"

I need a regular expression matching the content of a specific field number. E.g.

• 13 » kozen@kozen.de
• 27 » kozen
• 28 » the bozen
• 29 » da kozl street 23

That’s how far I got:

"([^"]*)",

which gives me the content of a field, and results in 123 for the first field. This is just the first one, I need number 13.

Another expression is:

("([^"]*)",){13}

which matches 13 times and the last matching results in "kozen@kozen.de",. The quotation marks and the comma should not be here

Actually, I thought the following should match the expression 13 times, but for some weird reason it does not work:

"([^"]*)",\13

If anyone has an idea I would appreciate your thoughts. I am messing around with that stuff for 6 hours now, google-ed the world out of the net but didn’t find a solution. Something ‘universal’ like the one above would be nice so I can just replace the number (’13′) with another column number to grab another column’s content.

Here are some helpers by the way:

• http://www.roblocher.com/technotes/regexp.aspx (Regular Expression Tester)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expressions