Regular Expression: Match everything except one specific character

Question

I try to make a specific expression but I am not able to solve my actual problem. Maybe some of you can...

I have the string:

<!ENTITY a0 "dosdosdosdosdosdosdosdosdosdosdosdosdosdos"

and now I want to match everything (at least 10 characters) inbetween the quotation marks, except a quotation mark.

I started with:

"(.{10,}?)" 

at the first sight, this matches very well, but this also matches the following string which is wrong for me.

<!ENTITY a0 "dosd" 
<!ENTITY a0 "osdos"

The match starts with the first quotation mark of the first line and ends with the last quotation marks of the last line.

I understand why this happens, but I am not able to build a regular expression which matches every character 10 times except a quotation mark. The dot is just too generic.

edit: new problem

new string:

<data>&a0;&a0;asddd&a0;&a0;&a0; 234324&a0;&a0;&a0;&a0;&a0;&a0;</data>

now i tried to match specific expressions inbetween those two XML-tags till the first "<" occurs. Inbetween these tags I need the appeareance of at least 10 "&a0" which results in

&[a-zA-Z0-9]+;

The problem is, that different other character strings (except < ) also may occur inbetween those tags. Is this possible to solve?

I tried with:

<[a-zA-Z0-9]+>([^<]{10,}?)<\/[a-zA-Z0-9]+>

But can now it matches everything and not the wanted &[a-zA-Z0-9]+;

Thanks, guys!

Answer 1

You may use

"([^"\r\n]{10,})"

See the regex demo .

The [^"\\r\\n]{10,} pattern matches 10 or more occurrences of any char but " , CR and LF.

Note you may use a greedy limiting (range/interval) quantifier here.

To restrict a generic pattern, a good idea is to check your requirements. If you actually plan to match letters, digits and _ , you may replace the [^"\\r\\n] negated character class with a \\w shorthand character class.