Question

I am writing to extract strings which are surrounded by quotes (“). I use the below statement in jquery to get it.

var item = objstr.match(/\"(([^\"])*)\"/g);

But i want to make an exception for \” to be allowed.

Answer 1

This regex might work as well, without using look-aheads or look-behinds: (remove the spaces!)

/" (\\\\ | \\" | [^"])* "/

Read: Match a string from double-quote to double quote. In between there may be nothing or any combination of escaped backslashes \\, escaped double quotes \" or any non-quote characters. This allows for input like

"abc\\abc\abc\"abc\\\"abc"

to be valid, but not

"abc\\"abc"
//    ^ String terminates here

You might want that if your string may have the unescaped meaning \".

The answer from @nickb doesn’t have this feature/bug, whatever you call it. Both strings are valid in his regex.

Should your regex engine be able to turn off backtracking, this is the time to use it. In Perl, I have to add a + to a quantifier (or turn to esoteric branch resets). I don’t know what you need.

/" (\\\\ | \\" | [^"])*+ "/

We also want greedy behaviour, so no *? constructs.