From: Eirik Meland <eirikm@...>
Date: 2002-02-03T23:56:28+09:00
Subject: Re: group substitution doesn't work in character classes?

Harry Ohlsen <harryo@zip.com.au> writes:

> 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 :-).

* is greedy
to make * not greedy add a ?

/(['"])[^\1]*?\1/

would do it, or?

-- 
Eirik (eirikm@ifi.uio.no)
(shortcut-junkie)