如果包含转义的单引号，如何用文字替换单引号字符串？

Question

I need to escape all single quotes strings with literals and I am using the following regular expression:

'[^']*'

It is working fine, except when I have escaped single quotes in the string that must be replaced itself. For example, for the following string:

[COMPUTE:{IIF([Client Name] LIKE '%Happy%', 'Happy\'s', 'Other\'s Jr.')}]

I have these matches:

%Happy%
Happy\
, 
s Jr.

I can replace the \\' with some other sequence of characters (for example internal_value ) and than to perform the string replacement, but it will be more clearer if I can do this with the regular expression instead.

Answer 1

You can use

'((?:[^'\\]+|\\.)*)'

( modified a bit from the bible of regex :- Mastering Regular expression )

regexstorm demo

Answer 2

You just need a negative look behind. Basically just use a lazy match to anything .*? then you can put a negative look behind for a backslash (?<!\\\\) before the end single quote.

var reg = new Regex(@"'.*?(?<!\\)'");

foreach(Match m in reg.Matches(@"[COMPUTE:{IIF([Client Name] LIKE '%Happy%', 'Happy\'s', 'Other\'s Jr.')}]"))
    Console.WriteLine(m);

outputs

'%Happy%'

'Happy\\'s'

'Other\\'s Jr.'