What's the regex to match anything except a double quote not preceded by a backslash?

Question

In other words, I have a string like: "anything, escaped double-quotes: ", yep" anything here NOT to be matched. How do I match everything inside the quotes? I'm thinking `^"((?<!\)[^"]+)"` But my head spins, should that be a positive or a negative lookbehind? Or does it work at all? How do I match any characters except a double-quote NOT preceded by a backslash?

Accepted Answer

No lookbehind necessary:

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

So: match quotes, and inside them: either an escaped quote (`\"`) or any character except a quote (`[^"]`), arbitrarily many times (`*`).

What's the regex to match anything except a double quote not preceded by a backslash?

Solution

Problem