Question

I am working writing a regular expression used to validate string in C. Here is to what I have gone so far

'^"[A-Za-z0-9]*[\t\n]*"$'

for rules
– A string should begin with double quotes
– May not contain a newline character

However, I am not able to capture the rule for allowing ‘\’ or ‘”‘ in a string if preceded with ‘\’. Here is what I tried:

'^"[A-Za-z0-9]*[\t\n]*[\\\|\\"]?"$'

But this doesn’t seem to work. What might be wrong with the regular expression here?

Regards,
darkie15

Answer 1

If you want this regular expression:

^"[A-Za-z0-9]*[\t\n]*"$

To notate in C you must have double quotes around the string. Then you must escape the escapes and the double quotes inside the expression.

Here’s what you might have:

"^\"[A-Za-z0-9]*[\\t\\n]*\"$"