Capturing Multiple Quoted Groups in Go

This article addresses the challenge of parsing strings that follow a specific format: an uppercase command followed by optional quoted arguments. The goal is to extract both the command and the arguments as separate strings.

To handle this task, a regular expression is employed: re1, _ := regexp.Compile(([A-Z] )(?: "(¹ )")*). The first capturing group ([A-Z] ) matches the uppercase command, while the second capturing group (?: "([^"] )")* matches zero or more quoted arguments.

However, the provided code captures only the last argument. To resolve this issue, a more relaxed regex is suggested: re1, _ := regexp.Compile(([A-Z] )|(?: "(¹ )")). This regex uses a union | to allow either a command or an argument.

By modifying the code to:

re1, _ := regexp.Compile(`([A-Z] )|(?: "([^"] )")`)
results := re1.FindAllStringSubmatch(`COMMAND "arg1" "arg2" "arg3"`, -1)

fmt.Println("Command:", results[0][1])
for _, arg := range results[1:] {
    fmt.Println("Arg:", arg[2])
}

all arguments can now be successfully captured. This revised regex is more versatile, accommodating variations in input format where commands and arguments may occur in different orders.