Question

am having problems with some Regex code can anyone help.

I have the following string of data see below:

abcd " something code " nothing  "f <b> cannot find this section </b> "

I want to find the sections between " quotes.

I can get if to work fine using the following regax:

foreach (Match match in Regex.Matches(sourceLine, @""((\\")|[^"(\\")])+""))

However, if section between the quotes contain <> does not find the section. Not sure what to do to include the <> tags in the regex.

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

A character class […] describes a set of allowed characters and a negated character class [^…] describes a set of disallowed characters. So [^"(\\")] means any character except &, q, u, o, t, ;, (, \, and ). It does not mean anything but "(").

Try this instead:

"(.*?)"

Using the ungreedy quantifier *? matches as little as possible in opposite to the greedy quantifier * that matches as much as possible.