Regex for pulling data out of quotes?

Question

I'm looking for a regex that can pull out quoted sections in a string, both single and double quotes.

IE:

"This is 'an example', \"of an input string\""

Matches:

• an example
• of an input string

I wrote up this:

 [\"|'][A-Za-z0-9\\W]+[\"|']

It works but does anyone see any flaws with it?

EDIT: The main issue I see is that it can't handle nested quotes.

Answer 1

It works but doesn't match other characters in quotes (e.g., non-alphanumeric, like binary or foreign language chars). How about this:

[\"']([^\"']*)[\"']

My C# regex is a little rusty so go easy on me if that's not exactly right :)

Answer 2

Like that?

"([\"'])(.*?)\1"

Your desired match would be in sub group 2, and the kind of quote in group one.

The flaw in your regex is 1) the greedy "+" and 2) [A-Za-z0-9] is not really matching an awful lot. Many characters are not in that range.

Answer 3

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/171480/regex-grabbing-values-between-quotation-marks

Specifically these answers:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/171480/regex-grabbing-values-between-quotation-marks#171499 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/171480/regex-grabbing-values-between-quotation-marks#172996

Answer 4

@"(\"|')(.*?)\1"

Answer 5

You might already have one of these, but, in case not, here's a free, open source tool I use all the time to test my regular expressions. I typically have the general idea of what the expression should look like, but need to fiddle around with some of the particulars.

http://renschler.net/RegexBuilder/