正则表达式查找引号内的句子

Question

I have a very long text where some of the lines don't have quotation marks, some other lines are surrounded by double quotation marks and some others are only partially surrounded by quotation marks.

Here's an excerpt (each line is an example of the above cases):

#Example 1 (line with no quotation marks)
I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I would see if there was anything in it. 

#Example 2 (full line inside quotation marks)
"Why, my boy, you are all out of breath.  Did you come for your interest?" 

#Example 3 (only part of the line inside quotation marks)
"No, sir," I says, "I don't want to spend it. 

I'm trying to find a regular expression that would find all those lines that:

• Start with a newline
• Have double quotation marks at the beginning
• Have double quotation marks at the end

In other words, lines that follow the second example above. I've tried the following:

import re

def my_pattern():
  pattern = r'^\"(.+)\"$'
  return re.compile(pattern, re.M | re.IGNORECASE)

But I don't get the output I want. Any ideas on how I could improve my regex?

Answer 1

Instead of matching everything in-between. Try only matching non- " and non- \n characters.

^"([^"\n]+)"$