This a question I've solved and wanted to post in Q&A style because I think more people could use the solution. Or maybe improve the solution, show where it breaks.
The problem
You wanna do something with quoted strings and/or comments in a body of text. You wanna extract them, highlight them, what have you. But some quoted strings are inside comments, and sometimes comment-characters are inside strings. And strings delimiters can be escaped, and comments can be line-comments or block comments. And when you thought you had a solution somebody complains that it doesn't work when there's a regex-literal in his JavaScript. What do?
Concrete example
var ret = row.match(/'([^']+)'/i); // Get 1st single quoted string's content
if (!ret) return ''; /* return if there's no matches
Otherwise turn into xml: */
var message = '\t<' + ret[1].replace(/\[1]/g, '').replace(/\/@(\w+)/i, ' $1=""') + '></' + ret[1].match(/[A-Z_]\w*/i)[0] + '>';
alert('xml: \'' + message + '\''); /*
alert("xml: '" + message + "'"); // */
var line = prompt('How do line-comments start? (e.g. //)', '//');
// do something with line
This code is nonsense, but how do I do the right thing in each of the cases of the above JavaScript?
The only thing I found that comes close is this: Comments in string and strings in comments where Jan Goyvaerts himself answered with a similar approach. But that one doesn't handle apostrophe-escaping yet.
