If you want to only dissolve sugar and not carboxylic acid or a neutral compound, how would you accomplish this? In the lab we used ether, but that dissolves all three.

Our two reactions were:

RH(ether) + NaOH(aq) -> RCOO-(aq) + Na+(aq) +H2O(l) + RH(ether)

and

HCl(aq) + RCOO-(aq) -> RCOOH(s) + Cl-(aq)

Thanks!