How to get substring " It's big \"problem " using a regexp
s = ' function(){ return " Is big \"problem "; }';
views:
3743answers:
5Nice, but too flexible for the request (will match single quotes...). And can be simplified to /".*?(?<!\\)"/ unless I miss something. Oh, and some languages (eg. JavaScript) alas doesn't understand negative lookbehind expressions.
PhiLho
2008-10-30 12:47:27
@PhiLho, just using a single (?<!\\) would fail on escaped backslashes at the end of the string. True about look-behinds in JavaScript though.
MizardX
2008-11-01 08:57:33
+3
A:
Friedl's classic "unrolled-loop" pattern:
/"[^"\\]*(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*/
Alan Moore
2008-10-30 11:13:13
A:
One has to remember that regexps aren't a silver bullet for everything string-y. Some stuff are simpler to do with a cursor and linear, manual, seeking. A CFL would do the trick pretty trivially, but there aren't many CFL implementations (afaik).
Henrik Paul
2008-10-30 11:18:23
True enough, but this problem is well within the capabilities of regexes, and there are a great many implementations of those.
Alan Moore
2008-10-30 16:45:48
+5
A:
/"(?:[^"\\]|\\.)*"/
Works in The Regex Coach and PCRE Workbench.
Example of test in JavaScript:
var s = ' function(){ return " Is big \\"problem\\", \\no? "; }';
var m = s.match(/"(?:[^"\\]|\\.)*"/);
if (m != null)
alert(m);
PhiLho
2008-10-30 11:59:45