PHP and RegEx: Split a string by commas that are n

Question

Two days ago I started working on a code parser and I'm stuck.

How can I split a string by commas that are not inside brackets, let me show you what I mean:

I have this string to parse:

one, two, three, (four, (five, six), (ten)), seven

I would like to get this result:

array(
 "one"; 
 "two"; 
 "three"; 
 "(four, (five, six), (ten))"; 
 "seven"
)

but instead I get:

array(
  "one"; 
  "two"; 
  "three"; 
  "(four"; 
  "(five"; 
  "six)"; 
  "(ten))";
  "seven"
)

How can I do this in PHP RegEx.

Thank you in advance !

Answer 1

I can't think of a way to do it using a single regex, but it's quite easy to hack together something that works:

function process($data)
{
        $entries = array();
        $filteredData = $data;
        if (preg_match_all("/\(([^)]*)\)/", $data, $matches)) {
                $entries = $matches[0];
                $filteredData = preg_replace("/\(([^)]*)\)/", "-placeholder-", $data);
        }

        $arr = array_map("trim", explode(",", $filteredData));

        if (!$entries) {
                return $arr;
        }

        $j = 0;
        foreach ($arr as $i => $entry) {
                if ($entry != "-placeholder-") {
                        continue;
                }

                $arr[$i] = $entries[$j];
                $j++;
        }

        return $arr;
}

If you invoke it like this:

$data = "one, two, three, (four, five, six), seven, (eight, nine)";
print_r(process($data));

It outputs:

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