Reading plain text file database tables
Stephan Houben
stephan at pcrm.win.tue.nl
Thu Sep 9 08:24:41 EDT 1999
On Thu, 09 Sep 1999 17:45:28 +0800, Li Dongfeng
<mavip5 at inet.polyu.edu.hk> wrote:
>Thanks for the direction. I'm also
>trying to solve this with RE. But in order
>to extract "ab \" cd" like structure,
>your [^"\\] seems puzzling, because anything
>inside [] represent only one character, not
>the '\"' two character sequence.
No, but the other possibility handles that case.
[^"\\"] means "match anything NOT a " or a \".
\\. means "match a \ followed by anything (especially \")".
Together these mean: match anything not containing a
", except when " is preceded by \.
There are other ways to express this idea; another one
that is pretty clear (I hope) is:
([^"]*\\")*[^"]*
This interprets the string as:
<portion containing no "> + \" + <portion containing no ">
+ \" + ... + \" + <portion containing no ">
Aren't regexes fun?
Greetings,
Stephan
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