Regexp matching of list of quotes strings - unquoted

Question

in Javascript, the following:

var test = '"the quick" "brown fox" "jumps over" "the lazy dog"';
var result = test.match(/".*?"/g);
alert(result);

yields "the quick","brown fox","jumps over","the lazy dog"

I want each matched element to be unquoted: the quick,brown fox,jumps over,the lazy dog

what regexp will do this?

Answer 1

You can use the Javascript replace() method to strip them out.

var test = '"the quick" "brown fox" "jumps over" "the lazy dog"';

var result = test.replace(/"/, '');

Is there more to it than just getting rid of the double-quotes?

Answer 2

Here's one way:

var test = '"the quick" "brown fox" "jumps over" "the lazy dog"';
var result = test.replace(/"(.*?)"/g, "$1");
alert(result);

Answer 3

There are two parts to the fix for your problem, I think...

First, the .*? means "zero or more of any character, repeated zero or one times", which is an odd way of writing .*. More seriously, the 'any character' bit includes double quotes -- what you seem to be after is, therefore:

/"[^"]*"/g

This matches a double-quote, any string of characters excluding double quotes, and another double quote.

The second part is that you want to capture just the part inside the double quotes. In Perl or systems using PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions) -- not sure whether Javascript falls into that category -- then you would use parentheses to capture the information you're after:

/"([^"]*)"/g

You then have to know how to get at the substrings - that varies from language to language, and I don't know enough Javascript to help at that point.

Answer 4

This seems to work:

var test = '"the quick" "brown fox" "jumps over" "the lazy dog"';
var result = test.match(/[^"]+(?=(" ")|"$)/g);
alert(result);

Note: This doesn't match empty elements (i.e. ""). Also, it won't work in browsers that don't support JavaScript 1.5 (lookaheads are a 1.5 feature).

See http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/redev2.shtml for more info.

Answer 5

It is not one regexp, but two simpler regexps.

var test = '"the quick" "brown fox" "jumps over" "the lazy dog"';

var result = test.match(/".*?"/g);
// ["the quick","brown fox","jumps over","the lazy dog"]

result.map(function(el) { return el.replace(/^"|"$/g, ""); });
// [the quick,brown fox,jumps over,the lazy dog]

Answer 6

This is what I would use in actionscript3:

var test:String = '"the quick" "brown fox" "jumps over" "the lazy dog"';
var result:Array = test.match(/(?<=^"| ").*?(?=" |"$)/g);
for each(var str:String in result){
    trace(str);
}

Answer 7

grapefrukt's answer works also. I would up using a variation of David's

match(/[^"]+(?=("\s*")|"$)/g)

as it properly deals with arbitrary amounts of white space and tabs tween the strings, which is what I needed.