Question

actually I need to write just a simple program in JAVA to convert MySQL INSERTS lines into CSV files (each mysql table equals one CSV file)

is the best solution to use regex in JAVA?

My main problem how to match correctly value like this: ‘this is \’cool\’…’
(how to ignore escaped ‘)

example:

INSERT INTO `table1` VALUES ('this is \'cool\'...' ,'some2');
INSERT INTO `table1` (`field1`,`field2`) VALUES ('this is \'cool\'...' ,'some2');

Thanks

Answer 1

Assuming that your SQL statements are syntactically valid, you could use

Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("'(?:\\\\.|[^'\\\\])*'");

to get a regex that matches all single-quoted strings, ignoring escaped characters inside them.

Explanation without all those extra backslashes:

'         # Match '
(?:       # Either match...
 \\.      # an escaped character
|         # or
 [^'\\]   # any character except ' or \
)*        # any number of times.
'         # Match '

Given the string

'this', 'is a \' valid', 'string\\', 'even \\\' with', 'escaped quotes.\\\''

this matches

'this'
'is a \' valid'
'string\\'
'even \\\' with'
'escaped quotes.\\\''