Pattern for apostrophe inside quotes

Question

I am looking for a pattern that can find apostrophes that are inside single quotes. For example the text

Foo \'can\'t\' bar \'don\'t\'

I want to find and replace

Answer 1

I believe you need to require "word" characters to appear before and after a ' symbol, and it can be done with a word boundary:

\b'\b

See the regex demo

To only match the quote inside letters use

(?<=\p{L})'(?=\p{L})
(?<=[[:alpha:]])'(?=[[:alpha:]])
(?U)(?<=\p{Alpha})'(?=\p{Alpha})  # Java, double the backslashes in the string literal

Or ASCII only

(?<=[a-zA-Z])'(?=[a-zA-Z])