Question

I have a value like this:

'Foo Bar' 'Another Value' something else 

What regex will return the values enclosed in the quotation marks (e.g. Foo Bar and Another Value)?

Answer 1

I’ve been using the following with great success:

([''])(?:(?=(\\?))\2.)*?\1 

It supports nested quotes as well.

For those who want a deeper explanation of how this works, here’s an explanation from user ephemient:

([''']) match a quote; ((?=(\\?))\2.) if backslash exists, gobble it, and whether or not that happens, match a character; *? match many times (non-greedily, as to not eat the closing quote); \1 match the same quote that was use for opening.