Replace characters inside a RegEx match

Question

I want to match certain lines inside any text and inside that match, I want to replace a certain character as often, as it occurs. Sample Text:

Any text and "much" "more" of it. Don't replace quotes here
CatchThis( no quotes here, "any more text" , "and so on and so forth...")
catchthat("some other text" , "or less")
some text in "between"
CatchAnything ( "even more" , "and more", no quotes there, "wall of text")
more ("text"""") and quotes after...

Now I want to replace every quote inside the round brackets with, lets say, a hash sign. Desired outcome:

Any text and "much" "more" of it. Don't replace quotes here
CatchThis( no quotes here, #any more text# , #and so on and so forth...#)
catchthat(#some other text# , #or less#)
some text in "between"
CatchAnything ( #even more# , #and more#, no quotes there, #wall of text# )
more ("text"""") and quotes after...

Matching the lines is easy. Here's my pattern for that:

(?i)Catch(?:This|That|Anything)[ \t]*\(.+\)

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to match every quote and replace it...

Answer 1

The common approach to matching all occurrences of some pattern inside 2 different delimiters is via using \\G anchor based regular expression.

(?i)(?:\G(?!\A)|Catch(?:This|That|Anything)\s*\()[^()"]*\K"

See the regex demo .

Explanation :

• (?i) - case insensitive modifier
• (?: - a non-capturing group matching 2 alternatives
  • \\G(?!\\A) - a place in the string right after the previous successful match (as \\G also matches the start of the string, the (?!\\A) is necessary to exclude that possibility)
  • | - or
  • Catch(?:This|That|Anything) - Catch followed with either This or That or Anything
  • \\s* - 0+ whitespaces
  • \\( - a literal ( symbol
• ) - end of the non-capturing group
• [^()"]* - any 0+ chars other than ( , ) and "
• \\K - a match reset operator
• " - a double quote.

Answer 2

Do you really need to replace this inside regex? If your regex finds what you want, you can replace character on found string