Question

I am maintaining an old system that have saving issue when a string contains a single quote.

For example these will fail:

"update table set column2 = 'O'Connell', column3 = 'O'Riordon' where column1 = 1"
"insert into table (column1, column2, column3, column4, column5, column6, column7) values('O'Reilley','state, postcode','',1,2,'O'Riordon')". 

So far I’ve came up with this working vbscript regular expression

([,=(]\s*'[^']*)'([^']*'\s*[,)\s])

Is it possible to write a vbscript regular expression without using the header [(|=|\s|,] and trailer [,|)|\s]?

Thanks.

EDIT: Fix the posted regex to remove | from header and trailer.
The regexp is used as follows

regexp.replace("string","$1''$2")

Answer 1

The only way I can think of works only if the string that contains the single quote never contains whitespace. In that case, you can search for

\B'([^'\s]*'[^'\s]*)'\B

Explanation:

\B        # Assert that there is no alphanumeric character before...
'         # the opening quote
(         # Match and capture...
 [^'\s]*  # Any number of non-quote/non-whitespace characters
 '        # One quote
 [^'\s]*  # Any number of non-quote/non-whitespace characters
)         # End of capture group 1
'         # Match the closing quote
\B        # Assert that there is no alphanumeric character afterwards