Question

After much googling, I’ve given up and come here to ask for direct assistance. Here’s what I need to do: a search on a certain directory (and all child directories and files) for the following pattern:

• An example in English: find all strings of text assigned to a PHP variable
• An example from the project: $pageTitle = "Some normal text here";

Since the variable name and the text assigned to it can be anything, I think I want something like this:

“Find all instances of a dollar sign, a single equals sign, single-or-double quotes, and a semi-colon all on a single line”

I think that’ll be specific enough to show me all of the instances I need to find. Is that possible via regex?

Answer 1

Something like the following should work:

^\s*\$\w+\s*=\s*('.*'|".*");\s*$

Explanation:

^              # start of string
\s*            # zero or more whitespace characters
\$             # literal dollar sign
\w+            # one or more word characters (variable name)
\s*            # zero or more whitespace characters
=              # literal equal sign
\s*            # zero or more whitespace characters
(              # start of capturing group
   '.*'          # single quoted string
   |             # OR
   ".*"          # double quoted string
)              # end of group
;              # literal semi-colon
\s*            # zero or more whitespace characters
$              # end of string

If you add what language or tool you are using you might get a more specific answer on how to use the regex and pull out what you need.