Question

The string looks like this:

abc def
  123 'abc' abc "def"
  bla bla

So I want to replace abc with something else, but to not affect the abc that’s within quotes. Same with def, which is using double quotes…

This is actually for a string that contains SQL queries, I want to replace table names without replacing by mistake data from fields which could contain the same word.

Answer 1

you can use regular expressions with negative lookahead and negative lookbehind. You can read more about that here: http://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html

Here is an example that matches abc:

(?<!['"])(?<target>abc)(?!['"]) – this will match any abc not surrounded by single or double quotes.