Import tabular data while skipping field delimiters within text delimiters

Question

I have data of the form:

X 1.213 'String Field With Lots of Spaces' 8.123
Y 2.43  'String Field With Lots of Spaces' 8.123
Z 4.83  'String Field With Lots of Spaces' 8.123

I'm trying to import it using the builtin "Table" format (or anything else that would work). Problem is, my field delimiter, a space, can occur within my text delimiters, as the above shows. Setting "FieldDelimiters"->" " and "TextDelimiters"->"'" does not do the trick. Is this possible or do I have to roll my own importer?

The data is a 2D array. The problem in reality is a little more complicated, in that I have two types of text delimiters, ' and ", and one can contain the other. And so a string can be of the form 'String "With" Lots" of Quotes' or "String 'With' Lots' of Quotes". I don't a priori know the type of entries in a column, their ordering, or their widths. I.e. everything has to be inferred on the fly.

Note I am not asking for code to do this from scratch: I can do it myself. I'm just wondering if the builtin importers support this.

Answer 1

You can Import as "Text". Then use ImportString and RegularExpression to parse. Finally, ToExpression to convert the numbers. It is bit of a run around. I guess this could be considered rolling your own importer.

With

str = "X 1.213 'String \"Field\" With \"Lots of\" Spaces' 8.123
  Y 2.43 \"String Field 'With' Lots 'of Spaces'\" 8.123
  Z 4.83 'String Field With Lots of Spaces' 8.123
  A 4.83 \"String Field With Lots of Spaces\" 8.123";

Updated for not knowing the types in each column.

StringCases[
  RegularExpression["((\"|')[^\\2]+?\\2)|([[:alpha:]])|(\\d+(\\.\\d+)?)"] :> 
   If["$4" != "", ToExpression@"$0", "$0"]]@StringSplit[str, "\n"]

{{"X", 1.213, "'String \"Field\" With \"Lots of\" Spaces'", 8.123}, 
 {"Y", 2.43, "\"String Field 'With' Lots 'of Spaces'\"", 8.123}, 
 {"Z", 4.83, "'String Field With Lots of Spaces'", 8.123}, 
 {"A", 4.83, "\"String Field With Lots of Spaces\"", 8.123}}

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

This gets 2 out of three lines right:

ImportString[

"X 1.213 'String Field \"With\" Lots of Spaces' 8.123
Y 2.43  \"String Field 'With' Lots of Spaces\" 8.123
Y 2.43  \"string 1 ' \" 'string 2 \" '"

, "Table", "TextDelimiters" -> {"'", "\""}] // MatrixForm

as you see if you are really general you end up with ambiguities. Most likely you need to import as "Lines" and work with string expressions.