regex: How to match escaped double quoted strings?

Question

I have strings such as the following:

\"Some text inside here. And perhaps special chars including newlines...\" then more text (out here)

How do I simply match and return that which is in between the escaped double quotes, discarding the rest?

Answer 1

You can't use this pattern:

    \".*\"

since "dot" does not match the new-line character unless you use the flag 's' which makes the "dot" match everything (including new-line character)

and even more this pattern would mismatch this example:

    "this is a quoted text" and "this is another one"

the pattern above would match the whole string instead of the two quoted texts. (since .* is greedy and would match the longest string it can, in this case the whole string.) instead you should use .*? which makes the pattern "reluctant" and it would match the shortest string it can.

so to wrap it up you can use this pattern with flag "s" (dot-match-all):

    \".*?\"

or use this:

    \"[^"]\"

which doesn't require the "s" flag. (since [^"] matches anything but " which includes new-line.)

(I'm not familiar with PHP syntax, so you should take care of applying the flags and escaping the characters yourself.)

Answer 2

I'm assuming that there are only two escaped double quotes in the string

match = s.match(/\\"(.*)\\"/m)
match[1] if match

Answer 3

这应该适合您：

b'\\".*?\\"'

Answer 4

This can be done without regex too:

$str = '\"Some text inside here. And perhaps special chars including newlines...\" then more text (out here)';

$out = explode('"', $str);

echo $out[0]; // outputs "\"
echo $out[1]; // outputs "Some text... ...\"
echo $out[2]; // outputs " then...here)"