What is the proper regular expression for an unescaped backslash before a character?

Question

Let\'s say I want to represent \\q (or any other particular \"backslash-escaped character\"). That is, I want to match \\q but not \\\\q

Answer 1

The best solution to this is to do your own string parsing as Regular Expressions don't really support what you are trying to do. (rep @Frank Krueger if you go this way, I'm just repeating his advice)

I did however take a shot at a exclusionary regex. This will match all strings that do not fit your criteria of a "\" followed by a character.

(?:[\\][\\])(?!(([\\](?![\\])[a-zA-Z])))