How to match string in single or double quoted using regex

Question

I\'m trying to write a regex that matches strings as the following:

translate(\"some text here\")

and

translate(\'some text here\'

Answer 1

You could go for:

translate\( # translate( literally
(['"])      # capture a single/double quote to group 1
.+?         # match anything except a newline lazily
\1          # up to the formerly captured quote
\)          # and a closing parenthesis

See a demo for this approach on regex101.com.

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In PHP this would be:

Note that you do not need to escape both of the quotes in square brackets ([]), I have only done it for the Stackoverflow prettifier.
Bear in mind though, that this is rather error-prone (what about whitespaces, escaped quotes ?).

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In the comments the discussion came up that you cannot say anything BUT the first captured group. Well, yes, you can (thanks to Obama here), the technique is called a tempered greedy token which can be achieved via lookarounds. Consider the following code:

translate\(
(['"])
(?:(?!\1).)*
\1
\)

It opens a non-capturing group with a negative lookahead that makes sure not to match the formerly captured group (a quote in this example).
This eradicates matches like translate("a"b"c"d") (see a demo here).

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The final expression to match all given examples is:

translate\(
(['"])
(?:
   .*?(?=\1\))
)
\1
\)