Question

Greetings, I have file with the following strings:

string.Format("{0},{1}", "Having \"Two\" On The Same Line".Localize(), "Is Tricky For regex".Localize());

my goal is to get a match set with the two strings:

• Having \”Two\” On The Same Line
• Is Tricky For regex

My current regex looks like this:

private Regex CSharpShortRegex = new Regex("\"(?<constant>[^\"]+?)\".Localize\\(\\)");

My problem is with the escaped quotes in the first line I end up stopping at the quote and I get:

• On The Same Line
• Is Tricky For This Style Too

however attempting to ignore the escaped quotes is not working out because it makes the Regex greedy and I get

• Having \”Two\” On The Same Line”.Localize(), “Is Tricky For regex”

We seem to be caught between maximum and minimum munge. Is there any hope? I have some backup plans. Can you Regex backwards? that would make it easier because I can start with the “()ezilacoL.”

EDIT:
To clarify. This is my lone edge case. Most of the time the string sits alone like:

var myString = "Hot Patootie".Localize()

Answer 1

This one works for me:

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

Tested on http://www.regexplanet.com/simple/index.html against a number of strings with various escaped quotes.

Looks like most of us who answered this one had the same rough idea, so let me explain the approach (comments after #s):

\"             # We're looking for a string delimited by quotation marks
(              # Capture the contents of the quotation marks
  (?:          #   Start a non-capturing group
    [^\\"]     #     Either read a character that isn't a quote or a slash
    |(?:\\\")  #     Or read in a slash followed by a quote.
  )*           #   Keep reading
)              # End the capturing group
\"             # The string literal ends in a quotation mark
\.Localize\(\) # and ends with the literal '.Localize()', escaping ., ( and )

For C# you’ll need to escape the slashes twice (messy):

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

Mark correctly points out that this one doesn’t match escaped characters other than quotation marks. So here’s a better version:

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

And its slashed-up equivalent:

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

Works the same way, except it has a special case that if encounters a slash but it can’t match \", it just consumes the slash and the following character and moves on.

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Thinking about it, it’s better to just consume two characters at every slash, which is effectively Mark’s answer so I won’t repeat it.