Find first specified char that is not quotes

Question

I am tryin to figure out how to find first occurence of specified character (lets say =) in string. This is easy, but i want position of that = only if its NOT in quotes.

For example, in this case:

  foo = bar

I want position of first =, but in this case:

  "foo = bar" = baz

I want position of the second =.

I found similar question here, but I need position, not splitting. And I must be able to deal with escaped quotes \" or \' so I think I wont be able to use string based approach to this problem.

One of my ideas was using lex. analysis with regexp based syntax analysis, which can find first occurence of = for me, but it seems rather heavy :)

What is your goal/orignal task? Maybe there is an easier solution… — feeela, Jul 13 '12 at 14:08
your not looking for the last pos of =? in that case use strrpos — Grumpy, Jul 13 '12 at 14:10
I think you will have to write a lexer. It's a colossal work... — Florent, Jul 13 '12 at 14:10
Grumpy: I am not looking for the last = because string may look like this: "foo = bar" = "baz = john doe" — Pirozek, Jul 13 '12 at 14:33

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 13 '12 at 14:09

4

This should be possible with a regular expression because quotes cannot be nested, something like the following:

^([^="]|"(\\"|[^"])*")*(=)

You'll need to find the index position of the final matched group (=).

Demo: http://www.rubular.com/r/jt5CSIaOjo

answered Jul 13 '12 at 14:09

mellamokb

56,094
12
110
136

1

the position can be found in php like this: `preg_match('/^([^="]|"(\\"|[^"])*")*(=)/',$searchstring,$matches,PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);` – Jan Prieser Jul 13 '12 at 14:13

Find first specified char that is not quotes

1 Answers1