Replace string except inside quotes?

[Jeff Shannon]

Michael J. Fromberger wrote:

>It's not the most elegant solution in the world.   This code does NOT 
>deal with the problem of commented text.  I think it will handle triple 
>quotes, though I haven't tested it on that case.
>  
>

I believe that it will probably work for triple quotes that begin and 
end on the same line.  Of course, the primary usage of triple-quotes is 
for multiline strings, but given that the file is being examined one 
line at a time,  you'd need some method of maintaining state in order to 
handle multiline strings properly.  (Note that this problem is true 
regardless of whether the strings are true triple-quoted multiline 
strings, or single-quoted single-line strings broken across two lines of 
source code using '\'.)

If the entire file is read in and processed as a single chunk, instead 
of line-by-line, then *some* of the problems go away (at the cost of 
potentially very large memory consumption and poor performance, if the 
file is large).  The fact that triple-quoted strings work out (mostly) 
correctly when viewed as three pairs of quotes will help.  But if a 
triple-quoted string *contains* a normally quoted string (e.g., """My 
"foo" object"""),  then things break down again.

In order to handle this sort of nested structure with anything 
resembling true reliability, it's necessary to step up to a true 
lexing/parsing procedure, instead of mere string matching and regular 
expressions.

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International