Matching pattern enclosed in quotes

Question

I am trying to get groups which match the pattern. Input String is class equals

'one and two!' and 'three or four five' and 'six'

I have tried following pattern. But it matches and which is not within single quotes

(?:'(?:\S*\s*)*(and|or)+(?:\s*\S*)*')+

I want groups like

'one and two!'
'three or four five'

All String which has and|or within single quotes should be matched. within single quote it can have special characters and many spaces etc

How can i alter the pattern which i have above?

Embedded single quotes? You mean something like this 'one and 'two''? Yes it can have any special character. like 'one and two's' is possible — Dheeraj Joshi, Apr 08 '14 at 08:10
And they won't even be escaped? Then you can't do that with regexes — fge, Apr 08 '14 at 08:13
Nope. Atleast can i do it if there are no quotes inside quotes? I can ask API provider to wrap everything in single quote and text wont have single quote — Dheeraj Joshi, Apr 08 '14 at 08:25

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 08 '14 at 08:12

1

try this

"'.+?(\\s(and|or)\\s).+?'"

answered Apr 08 '14 at 08:12

Evgeniy Dorofeev

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score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:13

Provided there are no single quotes in your single quotes then you can use a pattern such as:

final Pattern PATTERN = Pattern.compile("('[^']+')( (and|or) )?");

You would then collect all matches in a list as such:

final List<String> matches = new ArrayList<>();

final Matcher m = PATTERN.matcher(input);

while (m.find())
    matches.add(m.group(1));

If there are potential unescaped single quotes then this is not doable with regexes. If they can be escaped, then have a look here for a technique to write an efficient regex.

Matching pattern enclosed in quotes

2 Answers2