javascript regex to select quoted string but not escape quotes

Question

Original string:

some text \"some \\\"string\\\"right here \"

Want to get:

\"some \\\"string\\\"right here\"

Answer 1

Safe regex approach

Complementing @WiktorStribiżew's answer, there is a technique to start matching at the correct double quote using regex. It consists of matching both quoted and unquoted text in the form:

/"(quoted)"|unquoted/g

As you can see, the quoted text is matched by a group, so we'll only consider text backreferenced by match[1].

Regex

/"([^"\\]*(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*)"|[^"\\]*(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*/g

---

Code

var regex = /"([^"\\]*(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*)"|[^"\\]*(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*/g;
var s = "some text \\\"extras\" some \\\"string \\\" right\" here \"";
var match;
var res = [];

while ((match = regex.exec(s)) !== null) {
    if (match.index === regex.lastIndex)
        regex.lastIndex++;

    if( match[1] != null )
        res.push(match[1]); //Append to result only group 1
}

console.log("Correct results (regex technique): ",res)