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Question

I have a text like this "my text" "my text2" . How can I extract my text and my text2 into an array?

Answer 1

Loop over your input with:

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

and capture first group.

This construct will handle embedded quotes as well as empty strings. If you do not want empty strings, replace the first * with a + .

With PHP, this is done using preg_match_all :

preg_match_all('/"([^"]*(?:\\"[^"]*)*)"/', "input here", $matches);
# use the $matches array

Answer 2

If your strings don't have embedded quotes, you could simply use "(.*?)" . If they do, then it depends on how you quote them, but "(([^"\\\\]|\\\\.)*)" would handle backslash-quoted strings such as "\\"\\\\" . (Note: None of these strings are themselves quoted, except for the backslashes in the second regexp.)