Is there a regular expression that will ignore words that are surronded by quotes

Question

I am trying to create a regular expression that will not match words in quotes but will match words without quotes e.g

-"Welcome" - false
-Welcome - true

I have tried to extract the ones with quotes and removing them with this "([^"])*(\bwelcome\b)" but thats not a correct soltion — Sydney Collins, Feb 03 '17 at 21:01
@DanielBeck quoting OP: "that will **not** match words in quotes". Emphasis mine. — Joseph Marikle, Feb 03 '17 at 21:03
What about multiple words? Should the expression accommodate multiple words in quotes? (e.g. `"this has four" words` would match only the word "words") — Joseph Marikle, Feb 03 '17 at 21:05
@JosephMarikle at max in the use case it only going to be 2 words — Sydney Collins, Feb 03 '17 at 21:17
So what output do you expect for `"two" words`, and for `two words`? — trincot, Feb 03 '17 at 21:22
@trincot "two" words - two would not be matched for two words - the word two would be matched — Sydney Collins, Feb 03 '17 at 21:29

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 03 '17 at 22:12

You could match only those words that are followed by an even number of double quotes, which means they themselves are not within quotes (assuming your quotes are always paired):

\w+(?=[^"]*("[^"]*"[^"]*)*$)

function getWord(txt) {
  txt = txt.match(/\w+(?=[^"]*("[^"]*"[^"]*)*$)/);
  return txt && txt[0];
}

var input = document.querySelector('input');
var output = document.querySelector('span');

input.oninput = function () {
  output.textContent = getWord(input.value);
}

input.oninput();

Word: <input value='"two" words'><br>
First non-quoted: <span></span>

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:25

0

(?=([^"]*"[^"]*")*[^"]*$) will exclude all double quotes in the string and all text within those double quotes.
This will also remove all newline characters if you have any
Here is my source

edited May 23 '17 at 12:25

Community

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answered Feb 03 '17 at 21:33

Legit Dongo

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Is there a regular expression that will ignore words that are surronded by quotes

2 Answers2