C# string pattern in regex

Question

What's the pattern of C# strings in regular expression? I mean some pattern that matches anything that Visual Studio recognizes as string

This pattern is what I have tried but it doesn't work in all cases :

"[A-z0-9\\+;"]+"

(of course this is not complete and there are a lot more characters that should be included but even here it's not working properly)

It works for a text like this : "kla\"+;s" but in this case : "a\"b + c" it only matches to "a\".

Actually I have testes a lot more but none of them were successful.

First of all I thought about this pattern: ".*" which won't work properly in a scenario like this : "a\"+;b" + "a\"b + c" which is not a string in fact but two separate strings and a plus operator

Did you want to match all the characters present inside the double quotes? Provide an actual string along with expected output. — Avinash Raj
– Avinash Raj, Commented Aug 2, 2015 at 11:20
In character sets you don't need to use the escape character. [A-z0-9\+;"]+ works the same. This regex would match all letters and numbers, as well as the back slash, + , ; and ". Is that what you're wanting? — Izzy
– Izzy, Commented Aug 2, 2015 at 11:23
@Flipybitz, Not actually. I haven't escaped those characters, I have escaped this character '\'. — Saeed mohammadi
– Saeed mohammadi, Commented Aug 2, 2015 at 11:27
Ah, I see what you were trying to accomplish, my bad I was wrong. — Izzy
– Izzy, Commented Aug 2, 2015 at 11:32

Avinash Raj · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-02 11:47:23Z

3

To match all the double quoted blocks.

@"(?<!\\)"".*?(?<!\\)"""

DEMO

Explanation:

(?<!\\)" negative lookbehind which asserts that the match " must not be preceded by a backslash. In C# double "" means a single double quotes. Another " is used just for escaping purpose. So this ensures that the starting double quotes must not be an escaped one.
.*? Non-greedy pattern which matches all the characters non-greedily until
(?<!\\)" an unescaped double quotes was found.

edited Aug 2, 2015 at 11:47

answered Aug 2, 2015 at 11:29

Avinash Raj

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2 Comments

Izzy Over a year ago

Your solution covers much more than mine does, removed my post. I'd upvote yours if I hadn't reached my vote limit :)

Saeed mohammadi Over a year ago

Cooool, It's fantastic, but can you explain about it a little more or introduce me some link to read about it? (read about regular expression you have used :) I haven't seen something like this before)

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