regex match keywords that are not in quotes

user_637142 0
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How will I be able to look for kewords that are not inside a string.

For example if I have the text:

Hello this text is an example.

bla bla bla "this text is inside a string"

"random string" more text bla bla bla "foo"

I will like to be able to match all the words text that are not inside " ". In other I will like to match:

enter image description here

note I do not want to match the text that is highlighted on red because it is inside a string

Possible solution:

I been working on it and this is what I have so far:

(?s)((?<q>")|text)(?(q).*?"|)

note that regex uses the if statement as: (?(predicate) true alternative|false alternative)

so the regex will read:

find " or text. If you find " then continue selecting until you find " again (.*?") if you find text then do nothing...

when I run that regex I match the whole string though. I am asking this question for purposes of learning. I know I can remove all strings then look for what I need.

parsing regex c#
4 Answers

I have used these answers a lot of times till now and want to share alternative approach of fixing this, as sometimes I was not able to implement and use the given answers.

Instead of matching keywords out of something, break the tasks to two sub tasks:

  1. replace everything you do not need to match with empty string
  2. use ordinary match

For example, to replace the text in quotes I use:

[dbo].[fn_Utils_RegexReplace] ([TSQLRepresentation_WHERE], '''.*?(?<!\\)''', '')

or more clear: '.*?(?<!\\)'.

I know that this may looks like double work and have performance impact on some platforms/languages, so everyone need to test this, too.

user_10803540
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