Tell RegEx to ignore parenthesis when inside a quote

php, regex, regex-group

Solution

You can use lookahead for this purpose

Here's my regex that will match to the second argument of all the `extends`

(?=(\w+)|\w+())[\w)(]+

Breakdown:

`'` : Start the search for string with quote

`?=XXX)` : Positive look ahead which ensures XXX is present ahead

`(\w+\)|\w+\()` : Search for either opening or closing braces

Now if this look ahead was successful we can be sure that we have a quote followed by a parenthesis. Now we can simply write the regex to make parenthesis

`[\w\)\(]+` : Doing just that

Now that we can locate the quotes with parenthesis inside it, we can use the if-else condition to use appropriate rules for each case

`(?(?=regex)then|else)`

Here's how I've implemented it :

(?(?='(?=(\w+\)|\w+\())) <- condition, same as above
'[\w\)\(]+' <- We have a match so we ignore parenthesis
|'\w+' <- Here we don't
)

ps. I did not understand a lot of what you've written for other part in your regex, maybe it's to cover some other cases so I'm not writing up to modify your original regex. You can simply switch the check for second parameter with the one mentioned above

Here's my regex which matches to all your cases.

`\B@\w+\('[\w+\s]+',\s+(?(?='(?=(\w+\)|\w+\()))'[\w\)\(]+'|('\w+'|\$\w+))\)`

You can see the test cases here

PS. Just to show that it actually works, I've added a few failing test cases

Problem

Original source