From: Harry Ohlsen <harryo@...>
Date: 2002-01-29T06:58:56+09:00
Subject: Re: group substitution doesn't work in character classes?

In article <m2itbd3xvx.fsf@psychomutt.net>, "Thom Harp"
<thomharp@charter.net> wrote:

> I'm trying to remove quoted substrings from a string.  The substrings
> may be quoted with single or double quotes so I use the following
> regular expression which I thought would find the first quote character
> and remove everything up to the next occurance of that same character:
> 
> /(['"])[^\1]*\1/

I know there's an example of matching comma-separated lists (which
include singly and doubly quoted strings) in the Mastering Regular
Expressions O'Reilly book.

I recall that it was a very complex RE, so maybe this just isn't an easy
thing to do with the design of REs.

That should help you a lot.  Someone's bound to show you how to do it,
now.  That's what always happens when I make rash statements :-).