Question

I would like to match attribute pairs from string similiar to the one below

<tag_name attra="#{t("a.b.c")}" attrb="aa a">

… sould match on

attra=”#{t(“a.b.c”)}”
and
attrb=”aa a”

thanks in advance
Marius

Answer 1

You could use lookaheads to detect if the quotes that are ending are part of the value or not, by looking if they are followed by a space or ‘>’

ruby-1.8.7-p248 > s='<tag_name attra="#{t("a.b.c")}" attrb="aa a">'
=> "<tag_name attra=\"\#{t(\"a.b.c\")}\" attrb=\"aa a\">" 
ruby-1.8.7-p248 > s.scan /\w+=".*?"(?=\s|>)/
=> ["attra=\"\#{t(\"a.b.c\")}\"", "attrb=\"aa a\""] 

Of course that won’t work if you have a quote followed by a space or a ‘>’ in your attribute value, so no matter how you look at it its a losing battle unless you skip those quotes inside the attribute values or preprocess them somehow. That’s the reason why every language’s string and regex have delimiters be skipped or preprocessed if they’re found inside of the delimited value.