perl regex to match “”(string) syntax

Question

I am new to Perl and regex and I need to extract all the strings from a text file. A string is identified by anything that is wrapped by double quotes.

Example of string:

"This is string"
"1!=2"
"This is \"string\""
"string1"."string2"
"S
t
r
i
n
g"

The code:

my $fh;

open($fh,'<','text.txt') or die "$!";

undef $/;
my $text = <$fh>;

my @strings = m/".*"/g; # this returns the most out "" in example 4
my @strings2 = m/"[^"]*"/g #fixed the above issue but does not take in example 3

Edited : I want to get (1) a double quote, followed by (2) zero or more occurrences of either a non-double-quote-non-backslash or a backslash followed by any character, followed by (3) a double quote. (2) can be anything but "

The regex provided below m/"(?:\\.|[^"])*"/g however when the there is a line with "string1".string2."string2" it will return "string1" string2 "string3"

Is there any wher to skip the previously matched word?

Can anyone please help?

Answer 1

One possible approach:

/"(?:\\.|[^"])*"/

... that reads as:

• match double quotation mark,

• followed by any number of...

  --- either any escaped character (any symbol prepended by \\ )

  --- or any character that's not a double quotation mark

• followed by double quotation mark

The key trick here is using alternation that'll eat any escaped symbol - including escaped double quotation mark.

Demo .