Question

I have a text and want to find some strings with regular expressions. My problem is i don’t know how to make “&&-and” here.

I have text like this:

AB " something is here;
  and here...
";
...
AB "new line 
 continues ... ";

I want to find all AB, which end with “;

My code i use for “;” :

var matches = Regex.Matches(tmp, "(AB) ([^;]*);", RegexOptions.Singleline);

But how can i make "(AB) ([^(\";)]*)\";" or just "(AB) ([^(\"&&;)]*)(\"&&;") ?

I would like to have:

AB

" something is here;
 and here ...
"

AB
"new line
 continues ..."

Answer 1

^ can only negate character classes, which in turn cannot contain strings of characters (but only single characters). However, there is a similar concept for strings of characters (or in fact full-fledged regular expressions) called a negative lookahead:

@"(AB) (\"(?:(?!\";).)*\");"

This will now consume arbitrary characters (.) as long as they do not mark the start of a ";. Keep using the Singleline option, of course. You can do some reading on lookaround assertions here.