I'm having trouble writing a regular expression (suitable for PHP's preg_match()) that will parse keyword='value' pairs regardless of whether the <value> string is enclosed in single or double quotes. IOW in both of the following cases I need to get the <name> and <value> where the <value> string may contain the non-enclosing type of quotes:
name="value"
name='value'
In Perl this is a regular expression that would work. It first matched for the start of the line then matches for one or more non = characters and sets them to $1. Next it looks for the = then the a non parentheses with a choice of matching for " or ' and sets that to $2.
/^([^=]+)=(?:"([^"]+)"|'([^']+)')$/
If you wanted it to match blank expressions like.
This=""
Replace the last two + with an * Otherwise this should work
Edit As mentioned in the comments. Doug used...
/^\s?([^=]+)\s?=\s?("([^"]+)"|\'([^\']+)\')\s?/
This will match one optional white space on ether end of the input or value and he has removed the end of line marker.
/^(\w+?)=(['"])(\w+?)\2$/
Which will place the key in $1 and the value in $3.