Python regex to match text in single quotes, ignoring escaped quotes (and tabs/newlines)

Question

Given a file of text, where the character I want to match are delimited by single-quotes, but might have zero or one escaped single-quote, as well as zero or more tabs and n

Answer 1

You cold try it like this:

pattern = re.compile(r"menu_item = '(.*?)(?

It will start matching at the first single quote it finds and it ends at the first single quote not preceded by a backslash. It also captures any newlines and tabs found between the two single quotes.