Re^2: regex for strings with escaped quotes

[morgon]

It somehow stops working when I use the regex directly and I cannot see why:

my $str = q{ x "foo \"bar\"" y };
$str =~ /(?:(?|(?:\")(?:[^\\\"]*(?:\\.[^\\\"]*)*)(?:\")))/;
print $1, "\n";

# prints nothing

[haukex]

$str =~ /(?:(?|(?:\")(?:[^\\\"]*(?:\\.[^\\\"]*)*)(?:\")))/;

It's missing the capture group that I added: /($RE{delimited}{-delim=>'"'})/

[morgon]

I don't quite understand...

I do basically this:

use Regexp::Common qw/delimited/;

print $RE{delimited}{-delim=>'"'};

And take what is printed.

How can I get to a pure regex that works then?

[haukex]

The regex is:

(?:(?|(?:\")(?:[^\\\"]*(?:\\.[^\\\"]*)*)(?:\")))

which contains no capturing groups, hence $1 isn't populated. In my first bit of code, in the regex I added an extra set of parentheses, /($RE{delimited}{-delim=>'"'})/, so there is a capturing group there. That's the equivalent of:

((?:(?|(?:\")(?:[^\\\"]*(?:\\.[^\\\"]*)*)(?:\"))))

Alternatively, you can take the first regex above and just change the non-capturing group (?:...) that surrounds the entire expression into a capturing group:

((?|(?:\")(?:[^\\\"]*(?:\\.[^\\\"]*)*)(?:\")))

Or, since you said you wanted to capture the stuff between the quotes, change that non-capturing group into a capturing one:

(?:(?|(?:\")([^\\\"]*(?:\\.[^\\\"]*)*)(?:\")))

Plus, there's a bunch of simplifications that could be made to the first regex above anyway (really just removing unnecessary groups):

/ \" [^\\\"]* (?: \\. [^\\\"]* )* \" /x

and just add capturing groups to that as needed.