Question

How could I convert something like this:

"hi (text here) and (other text)" come (again)

To this:

"hi \(text here\) and \(other text\)" come (again)

Basically, I want to escape “only” the parentheses that are inside quotes.

EDIT

I’m to new in Regex and so, I tried this:

$params = preg_replace('/(\'[^\(]*)[\(]+/', '$1\\\($2', $string);

But this will just escape the first occurrence of (.

EDIT 2

Maybe I should mention that my string could have these parentheses already escaped and, in this case, I don’t want to escaped them again.

By the way, I need it working for both double and single quotes but I think that I can do that as long as I have a working example for one of them.

Answer 1

This should do it for both single and double quotes:

$str = '"hi \(text here)" and (other text) come \'(again)\'';

$str = preg_replace_callback('`("|\').*?\1`', function ($matches) {
    return preg_replace('`(?<!\\\)[()]`', '\\\$0', $matches[0]);
}, $str);

echo $str;

output

"hi \(text here\)" and (other text) come '\(again\)'

It is for PHP >= 5.3. If you have a lower version (>=5) you have to replace the anonymous function in the callback with a separate function.