Parsing input stream into named value pairs

Question

Hi everyone. I figured I would post this scenario, and hope to get some 'expert' opinions on what the best way to handle this would be.
I have an input stream being returned to me and I need to separate them into name/value pairs. I receive this as two lines of strings. The first line is the variable names, and the second line is the values. This is the format:
"Variable1","Variable2","Variable3","Variable4"
"Value1","Value2","Value3","Value4"
I need to separate this out into:
Variable1 = "Value1"
Variable2 = "Value2"
What I was thinking of doing is to create a hashtable, read the first line in and assign those as the keys, then read the second line in and assign those as the values. I'm not quite sure if this is even possible as of yet, but thats my original game plan. My primary goals are:
1. Seperate each variable name and match it with its appropriate value
2. Be able to retrieve each value by calling the appropriate variable name.
Any advice/opinion on this is greatly appreciated!!! Thanks!

Answer 1

You could choose to feed the String through an InputStream and use a StreamTokenizer, which is substantially more powerful than StringTokenizer. I would personally, however, choose to parse it myself, as antequated as that might seem. ;)
Presume that s1 is equal to
"Var1", "Var2", "MoreVars", "EvenMoreVars" , "LastVar"
And that s2 is equal to
"Hello","9900", ":)", "He said \"hi\".", "Hi, there."
These would make good sample data, but aren't necessarily the case.
String s1 = ...;
String s2 = ...;
HashMap map = null;
String[] keys = parseQuotedByCommas(s1);
String[] values = parseQuotedByCommas(s2);
if (keys.length==values.length)
    map = new HashMap();
    for (int i=0;i<keys.length;i++)
        map.put(keys, values[i]);
} else
// Error!
// throws IllegalArgumentException for improperly formatted strings
public static String[] parseQuotedByCommas(String s)
     ArrayList acc = new ArrayList();
     char[] ch = s.toCharArray();
     int i = 0;
     try
          while (i < ch.length)
               while (ch[i] == ' ') i++;
               if (i < ch.length)
                    if (ch[i] != '"')
                         throw new IllegalArgumentException(
                         "Expected '\"', receieved '" + ch[i] + "'");
                    i++;
                    StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
                    boolean stop = false;
                    while (!stop)
                         switch (ch[i])
                              case '"':
                                   if (ch[i - 1] == '\\')
                                        sb.append('"');
                                   else
                                        stop = true;
                                   break;
                              case '\\':
                                   int j = i;
                                   boolean write = true;
                                   while ((j >= 0) && (ch[j] == '\\'))
                                        write = !write;
                                        j--;
                                   if (write) sb.append('\\');
                                   break;
                              default:
                                   sb.append(ch[i]);
                         i++;
                    acc.add(sb.toString());
               if (i < ch.length)
                    while (ch[i] == ' ') i++;
                    if (i < ch.length)
                         if ((ch[i] != ',') && (ch[i] != '"'))
                              throw new IllegalArgumentException(
                              "Expected ',' or '\"', received '" + ch[i] + "'");
                         i++;
     } catch (IndexOutOfBoundsException oob)
          throw new IllegalArgumentException("Unexpected end of string.");
     return (String[]) (acc.toArray(new String[0]));
That should work for anything formatted as
<String> ::= [<WhiteSpace>] <Stmt> [ [<WhiteSpace>] , [<WhiteSpace>] <Stmt> ] *
<Stmt> ::= " <Characters> "
<Characters> ::= \" | \\ | <AnyCharacterExceptQuoteOrBackslash>
<WhiteSpace> ::= <Space>*
Any questions?
Oh, BTW, that was all blue 'cause the code tag doesn't take well to '"'.