Regex to pick characters outside of pair of quotes

Question

I would like to find a regex that will pick out all commas that fall outside quote sets.

For example:

\'foo\' => \'bar\',
\'foofoo\' => \'bar,         


        

Answer 1

The below regexes would match all the comma's which are present outside the double quotes,

,(?=(?:[^"]*"[^"]*")*[^"]*$)

DEMO

OR(PCRE only)

"[^"]*"(*SKIP)(*F)|,

"[^"]*" matches all the double quoted block. That is, in this buz,"bar,foo" input, this regex would match "bar,foo" only. Now the following (*SKIP)(*F) makes the match to fail. Then it moves on to the pattern which was next to | symbol and tries to match characters from the remaining string. That is, in our output , next to pattern | will match only the comma which was just after to buz . Note that this won't match the comma which was present inside double quotes, because we already make the double quoted part to skip.

DEMO

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The below regex would match all the comma's which are present inside the double quotes,

,(?!(?:[^"]*"[^"]*")*[^"]*$)

DEMO