From: Alan Chen <alan@...>
Date: 2002-11-15T02:49:58+09:00
Subject: Re: regex help

On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 03:39:09PM +0900, Shashank Date wrote:
> Using ruby 1.7.3 (2002-10-12) [i386-mswin32] on Win XP (Home)
> 
> Trying to creat a regex which will match a single-quoted string.
> My first attempt 'almost' works:  /\'.*?\'/
> 
> But then I also want it to match single-quoted strings which have embedded
> single quotes.
> To embed, you can escape a single quote by putting another single quote just
> before it.
> For example :
> 
> m = /\'.*?\'/.match(%Q{This is a 'single ''quoted'' string' with only one
> match})
> puts m[0]             #                              ^          ^
>                            #          These are two single quotes and not a
> double quote
> 
> 
> I want this to print:  'single ''quoted'' string' .
> But I am getting:     'single '

Since this type of regex question comes up regularly, I wonder how difficult
it would be to provide a regex extension which matches pairs of quoted characters;
either identical chars like ' or " or character pairs () or {}, etc...

-- 
Alan Chen
Digikata LLC
http://digikata.com