How can I edit my regex so that it captures only the substring between (and not including) quotation marks?

user_11370167 0
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I'm a total novice to regex, and have a hard time wrapping my head around it. Right now I have a column filled with strings, but the only relevant text to my analysis is between quotation marks. I've tried this:

response$text <-  stri_extract_all_regex(response$text, '"\\S+"')

but when I view response$text, the output comes out like this:

"\"caring\""

How do I change my regex expression so that instead the output reads:

caring
r regex
1 Answers

You can use

library(stringi)
response$text <- stri_extract_all_regex(response$text, '(?<=")[^\\s"]+(?=")')

Or, with stringr:

library(stringr)
response$text <- str_extract_all(response$text, '(?<=")[^\\s"]+(?=")')

However, with several words inside quotes, I'd rather use stringr::str_match_all:

library(stringr)
matches <- str_match_all(response$text, '"([^\\s"]+)"')
response$text <- lapply(matches, function(x) x[,2])

See this regex demo.

With the capturing group approach used in "([^\\s"]+)" it becomes possible to avoid overlapping matches between quoted substrings, and str_match_all becomes handy since the matches it returns contain the captured substrings as well (unlike *extract* functions).

user_38329700
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