Regex : Find a character unless it is surrounded by double quotes

Question

I wish to find a character such as ',' in a string unless it is surrounded by double quotes.

For example in the string: 'Example, "String,"'

I would like it to match the comma after 'Example' but not after 'String'.

Is there a regex that can do this?

Answer 1

You can negate a group of characters in regex by using (?![text]) .

For example, something like (?!"),(?!") would find all the , that are not "touched" by " . You may need to check your string with multiple variations of this regex to get the desired result but I think you should be able to work wit the given example.

Answer 2

Something like this?

 console.log( `For example in the string: 'Example, "String,"'`.match(/, /g).length, `For example, in the following string: 'Example, "String," I'd like to find all ","'`.match(/, /g).length, )