Question

I’m currently writing a parser for ColdFusion code. I’m using a regex (in c#) to extract the name datasource attribute of the cfquery tag.

For the time being the regex is the following
<cfquery\s.*datasource\s*=\s*(?:'|")(.*)(?:'|")

it works well for strings like
<cfquery datasource="myDS"
or
<cfquery datasource='myDS'

But it gets crazy when parsing strings like
<cfquery datasource="#GetSourceName('myDS')#"

Obviously the part of the regex (?:’|”) is the cause. Is there a way to only match single quote when the first match was a single quote? And only match the double quote when the first match was a double quote?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Edit: I think this should work in C# you just need to do a back reference:

datasource\s*=\s*('|")(.*)(?:\1)

or perhaps

datasource\s*=\s*('|")(.*)(?:$1)

matches datasource="#GetSourceName('myDS')#" with a back reference to the first match with \1.

Of course, you cannot ignore the first capture group with ?: and still have this work. Also, you may want to set the lazy flag so as not to match additional "‘s