Regular Expressions

[Roel Schroeven]

Ron wrote:
> This is probably a repeated question, but try as I might I was unable
> to find something similar in the archives.
> 
> I'm trying to develop a regular expression for recognizing a simplified
> C-Style string syntax.  I need it to be able to handle escape sequences
> of the form \x where x is any character including ".
> 
> Here's what I'm trying:
> 
>   \"([^"\\]|(\\.))*\"
> 
> When I try to get it to recognize something like:
> 
>    "I said, \"Hello!\""
> 
> It stops at the first quote after the \.

Works for me:

 >>> print re.search(r'\"([^"\\]|(\\.))*\"',
...                 r'"I said \"Hello!\""').group(0)
"I said \"Hello!\""


You can leave out the backslashes in fron of the first and last quotes
in the regex, by the way, at least if you use ' instead of " to delimite it:

>>> print re.search(r'"([^"\\]|(\\.))*"',
...                 r'"I said \"Hello!\""').group(0)
"I said \"Hello!\""


-- 
If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood
on the shoulders of giants.  -- Isaac Newton

Roel Schroeven