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

Try this regular expression:

(?:"(?:[^\\"]+|\\(?:\\\\)*[\\"])*"|'(?:[^\\']+|\\(?:\\\\)*[\\'])*')\s*=>\s*(?:"(?:[^\\"]+|\\(?:\\\\)*[\\"])*"|'(?:[^\\']+|\\(?:\\\\)*[\\'])*')\s*,

This does also allow strings like “'foo\'bar' => 'bar\\',”.