CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
Mariz Melo
Mariz Melo

Reputation: 850

regex - match character in between strings and everywhere

@name "@new other content" "@" @here and here@

I want to match all the "@" excluding the ones in between quotes.

I tried:

(?!\")\@(?!\")

It works partially, does not match "@" but does match "@new other content".

I am using with "preg_replace" in PHP.

Thanks for any help.

UPDATE:

In this case I want to match the @ on: @name, @here, here@ only...

Upvotes: 1

Views: 180

Answers (1)

stema
stema

Reputation: 92986

If the "@" is always directly after the " then you can use

(?<!\")\@

Your (?!\")\@(?!\") is wrong at that point, it has to be a negative lookbehind assertion ((?<!...)). and the following lookahead assertion is only failing, if the "@" is directly followed by a ".

If the "@" can be anywhere between quotation marks, then it is not possible with regex in php.

Under the assumption, that the quotes are always balanced you can try this

[^"\s]*@[^"\s]*(?=[^"]*(?:"[^"]*"[^"]*)*$)

See it here on Regexr

This simply matches a substring that contains a @, when there is an even amount of " ahead.

Be careful: it will fail when there is an unmatched quotation mark anywhere in the string.

Upvotes: 3

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