Question

I need to find and replace all occurrences of apostrophe character in a string, but only if this apostrophe is not followed by another apostrophe.

That is

abc’def

is a match but

abc”def

is NOT a match.

I’ve already composed a working pattern – (^|[^'])'($|[^']) but I believe it may be shorter and simpler.

Thanks,

Valery

Answer 1

depends on your environment – if your environment supports lookahead and lookbehind, you can do this: (?<!')'(?!')

Ref: http://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html