Javascript RegEx quote

Question

I\'m having trouble getting this Javascript Regular Expression to work. What i want is to find a character that starts with @\" has any characters in the middle

Answer 1

Gumbo's regexp is very nice and all, however it fails to detect escaped quotes (e.g. \", \\\", etc.). A regexp that solves this is as follows:

/@(["'])[^]*?[^\\](?:\\\\)*\1|@""|@''/g

An explanation (continuing from Gumbo's explanation):

• [^\\] matches the nearest character preccedding the ending quote that is not a backslash (to anchor the back-slash count check).
• (?:\\\\)* matches only if the number of backslashes is a multiple of 2 (including zero) so that escaped backslashes are not counted.
• |@"" checks to see if there is an empty double quote because [^\\] requires at least one character present in the string for it to work.
• |@'' checks to see if there is an empty single quote.