在正则表达式中引用引号之间的文本

Question

I have the following Regex using IgnoreCase and Multiline in .NET:

^.*?\WtextToFind\W.*?$

Given a multiline input like:

1 Some Random Text textToFind
2 Some more "textToFind" random text 
3 Another textToFinddd random text

The current regular expression matches with the lines 1 and 2. However I need to skip all the lines which textToFind is inside quotes and double quotes.

Any ideas how to achieve this?

Thanks!

EDIT:

Explanation: My purpose is to find some method calls inside VBScript code. I thought this would be irrelevant for my question, but after reading the comments I realised I should explain this.

So basically I want to skip text that is between quotes or single quotes and all the text that is between a quote and the end of line since that would be a comment in VBScript: If I'm looking for myFunc

Call myFunc("parameter") // should match
Call anotherFunc("myFunc") //should not match
Call someFunc("parameter") 'Comment myFunc //should not match
If(myFunc("parameter") And someFunc("myFunc")) //should match

Answer 1

With all of the possible cases involving mixed sets of quotes, a regex may not be your best option here. What you could do instead (after using your current regex to filter for everything but quotes), is count the number of quotes before and after the occurrence of textToFind . If both counts are odd, then you have quotes around your keyword and should scrap the line. If both are even, you've got matched quotes elsewhere (or no quotes at all), and should keep the line. Then repeat the process for double quotes. You could do all this only walking through the string once.

Edit to address the update that you're searching through code: There are some additional considerations to take into account.

• Escaped quotes (skip over the character after an escape character, and it won't be counted).
• Commented quotes, eg /* " */ in the middle of a line. When you hit a /* , just jump to the next occurrence of */ and then continue inspecting characters. You may also want to check whether the occurrence of textToFind is in a comment.
• End-of-line ' quotes - if it occurs (outside a literal string) before the keyword, it's not a valid method call.

The bottom line is still that regexes aren't the droids you're looking for, here. You're better off walking through lines and parsing them.

Answer 2

It seems like this should work for your actual implementation in all the examples you've given:

/\bmyFunc\(/

Demonstration - view console.

as long as you don't have something like "i'm going to call myFunc()" , but if you start trying to deal with quotes, multiple quotes, nested quotes, etc... it will get very messy (like trying to parse dom with regex) .

Also, it appears that you are checking within vbscript code. Comments in vbscript code start with an ' , right? You could check this as well, as it looks like you are doing this on a line by line basis, this should work for those type of comments:

/^\s*[^'].*\bmyFunc\(/

Demo