Grouping Regular expression BackReferences

Question

I have the following RegEx

id=(.*?) | id="(.*?)"

The reason for this is I am trying to replace Ids from the browsers DOM using JavaScript. IE, however strips quotes from element atributes as it appears not to require them in the DOM

The problem I have is that the backrefererences from each alternate statement are in separate groups ($1 and $2) as the match is only one OR the other can I return both the backreference as a single backreference?

EDIT:

<div id="test1" /><div id=test2 />

will match as follows

    match         |  $1   |   $2
--------------------------------
    id="test1"    | test1 |
    id=test2      |       |  test2

I just want both backreferences to be added to $1

Answer 1

what about:

id="?(.*?)"?

(possibly that . should be [^"] - I didn't test it)

Answer 2

id="?([\w-]*)"?

Answer 3

I’d use

id\s*=\s*("[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[^\s>]*)

This would match

id="foo"
id='bar'
id=baz

But to retrieve just the attribute value, you have to strip the " or ' at the begin/end if it’s surrounded by quotes.