Is there a simple Java Regex (*SKIP)(*F) alternative?

Question

I am making a program in Java, and have run into a slight problem using Regular Expressions. I want to capture everything not enclosed in quotes. I have a regex pattern for that, right here<\/a> , but the issue is, it cannot be used in Java. It uses the (*SKIP)(*F)<\/code> trick to skip over the ".*"<\/code> , and find anything else(using [^\\W]<\/code> ), but as I said, it cannot be used in Java. I have another pattern that is close, but not quite what I need, It will find everything that does not have quotes directly in front or behind it. The issue with that one, is that If I have something like this: Test1 "Hello World!" Test2<\/code> Test1 "Hello World!" Test2<\/code> , and will grab Test1<\/code> , Test2<\/code> , AND World<\/code> . I do not want to get World<\/code> , because it is in the quotes. What I want to know, is if it is even possible to do what I want, and how if so.

Answer 1

You must match the content you want to avoid and use a capture group to extract what you want (I don't think there is an other way)<\/em> . A convenient pattern to do that can be:

(?:[^\w"]+|"[^"]*")*+(\w+)

Answer 2

These verbs are a quite useful way to tell the regex engine (PCRE in this case) that you want to discard those matches.

".*"|([^\W]+)
or
".*"|(\w+)

Answer 3

Unfortunately I can't yet comment on other posts, but Federico Piazza's solution will fail if there are multiple sets of quotes. For example if your text was the following:

String text = "test1 \"hello world!\" test2 \"foobar\" test3";

Answer 4

You want words outside of quotes with excluding trailing spaces:

[^"\s]++((?=\s*"[^\s])|(?=\s*$)|(?=[^"]+\s+"))