Regex to extract a font family list from a CSS font declaration

Question

I am trying to create a .NET Regex to parse a CSS font declaration, which takes following form:

font: italic small-caps bold xx-small 3.0em "Times New Roman", Times, serif;

According to the CSS specification, all of the elements of the declared value are optional, and I have successfully created Regexes that match the first five elements (in all their different permitted forms), but I am having trouble creating a Regex that matches the list of font names, which is always the last element in the property value. I don't need to identify the individual elements in the font names list; I just want to match the list as a whole.

The font names list is comma separated list (with optional whitespace between elements) and each member of the list is either a single-word name or multiple words enclosed in quotes.

So far, I have come up with the following expression ...

(?<NAME_LIST>(?<QUOTED_NAME>"[\w ]+")|(?<SIMPLE_NAME>\w+)(?:,\s*(?<QUOTED_NAME>"\w ]+")|(?<SIMPLE_NAME>\w+))*)

... but it matches each member of the list individually, instead of matching the entire list.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Tim

Answer 1

Perhaps something like this (assuming you already have some regex in place before this bit to match the stuff before the font list)?

(?<FONTS>(?:['"]?(?:\w+\s*)+["']?(?:,\s*|\s*;))+)

Note that this matches the semicolon at the end as well, but that can easily be trimmed off using string operations.

EDIT: Since you're only evaluating the value part of the declaration, you'll want this regex instead, which also has some fixes because of other problems I noticed with my original pattern.

(?<FONTS>(?:\s*(?:(?:['"](?:\w|\s)+["'])|\w+)\s*(?:,|$))+)