CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexstring
Midas
Midas

Reputation: 591

Regex: How to match a part of the text within two characters e.g. quotes

I need to match a text within a text that is surrounded by two characters, in this case ‘ and ’. So assume that the whole string is:

Regarding the cat, I asked him ‘can you take care of my cat while I am away’ and he said ‘yes’.

Now, if I use the following regex 

(?<=‘)(.*?)(?=’)

It will match

can you take care of my cat while I am away

and

yes

What if I want to search for a single character e.g. "e" (matches in both quoted strings) or word e.g. "cat" within those two groups? How can I do that? I cannot figure out how to replace (.*?) in order to search for a substring/character within those special quotes.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 78

Answers (1)

Casimir et Hippolyte
Casimir et Hippolyte

Reputation: 89567

You only need to replace the dot that is too permissive with a class that excludes the closing quote and the first character of your target:

(?<=‘)([^’e]*(e)[^’]*)(?=’)

or

(?<=‘)([^’c]*(?:(?:\Bc|c(?!at\b))[^’c]*)*\b(cat)\b[^’]*)(?=’)

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions