How to match something with regex that is not between two special characters?

Question

I have a string like this:

a b c a b \" a b \" b a \" a \"

How do I match every a that is not part of a string deli

Answer 1

js-coder, resurrecting this ancient question because it had a simple solution that wasn't mentioned. (Found your question while doing some research for a regex bounty quest.)

As you can see the regex is really tiny compared with the regex in the accepted answer: ("[^"]*")|a

subject = 'a b c a b " a b " b a " a "'
regex = /("[^"]*")|a/
replaced = subject.gsub(regex) {|m|$1}
puts replaced

See this live demo

Reference

How to match pattern except in situations s1, s2, s3

How to match a pattern unless...