Question:

I have a string

<blockquote>

"FirstName=John, LastName=Smith, Address=1 Wall Street, NY"

</blockquote>

which needs to be split into a dictionary as:

<ul><li>{"FirstName", "John"} </li> <li>{"LastName", "Smith"} </li> <li>{"Address", "1 Wall Street, NY"}</li> </ul>

How can this be achieved using Regex considering Address field value has the delimiter ',' in it?

Also lets say I have the following string (note the colon in Address):

<blockquote>

"FirstName=John, LastName=Smith, Address:1 Wall Street, NY"

</blockquote>

How can the above mentioned result be with either = or : acting as the key value pair separator?

Assuming keys cannot contain any of delimeters (comma should be followed by key to separate pairs)

var data = "FirstName=John, LastName=Smith, Address:1 Wall Street, NY, USA, TestKey=TestValue"; var dic = new Dictionary<string, string>(); var reg = @"([^=:,]*)[=:](.*?)(?:$|,\s*(?=[^=:,]*[=:]))"; foreach (Match m in Regex.Matches(data, reg)) { var key = m.Groups[1].Value; var val = m.Groups[2].Value; dic[key] = val; Console.WriteLine("{0} = {1}", key, val); }