[SOLVED] Very confusing Regex problem

[lococobra]

First off, yeah... I know there's a regex section, but no one responded to my previous question that was over there, so here I am...

 

So lets say I have some php code stored in a variable, I want to isolate all the strings in that code. Right now I'm using the following expression:

<?php
preg_match_all("/([\"'])(.*?)\\1/", $input, $strings);
?>

 

However, if you look carefully there's a problem... What if it encounters a string like this "I read an article called \"How To Use Regex\" it was very good". Obviously there's going to be some massive butchering of that string.

 

So what I need to do is make sure that the character directly before the end quote (\\1) is not a backslash (\\)

 

But here's a major problem... double backslash in a regular expression is not the same as a double backslash in say a string. How do I do this?

 

My best guess:

<?php
preg_match_all("/([\"'])(.*?)^\\?\\1/", $orig, $st_s);
?>

 

Please help!

 

[sasa]

try

<?php
$input ='"I read an article called \"How To Use Regex\" it was very good"';
echo $input;
preg_match_all("/([\"'])(.*?[^\\\])\\1/", $input, $strings);
print_r($strings);
?>

[lococobra]

Thank you so much, that works great.

 

Actually, yours needed to be modified just a bit to make it work in 100% of cases...

 

"/([\"'])(.*?[^\\\]?)\\1/" Is what I ended up using (note the ? after [^\\\])

 

That was required so that strings like "" wouldn't kill it.

[effigy]

With lookaround: '/(["\'])(.*?)(?<!\\\)\1/'

[lococobra]

effigy, that code does not work.

[lococobra]

Nevermind, it does... and I'm terribly confused by it... but it works.