MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - How to match a string occurring somewhere between quotation marks

ElMiko · 01-22-2025, 07:03 AM

I am trying to find a word, but only when it occurs between quotation marks. For example, I want to find the word "were", but only when it occurs in dialogue (the punctuation has been smartened, by the way). As in:

Code:

“That’s where were going!”

Normally I'd try to use a combination of lookaheads and lookbehinds to find it, as in:

Code:

(?<=“.*?)\bwere\b(?=.*?”)

But because lookaheads/lookbehinds need a defined character length (I think), the above won't actually work...

Is there a way to match *and* isolate the "were"? Or is matching the whole dialogue string the best one can hope for (eg: “.*?\bwere\b.*?”)?

01-22-2025, 07:03 AM	#1
ElMiko Evangelist Posts: 455 Karma: 65460 Join Date: Jun 2011 Device: Kindle	[RegEx] How to match a string occurring somewhere between quotation marks I am trying to find a word, but only when it occurs between quotation marks. For example, I want to find the word "were", but only when it occurs in dialogue (the punctuation has been smartened, by the way). As in: Code: “That’s where were going!” Normally I'd try to use a combination of lookaheads and lookbehinds to find it, as in: Code: (?<=“.?)\bwere\b(?=.?”) But because lookaheads/lookbehinds need a defined character length (I think), the above won't actually work... Is there a way to match and isolate the "were"? Or is matching the whole dialogue string the best one can hope for (eg: “.?\bwere\b.?”)? Last edited by ElMiko; 01-22-2025 at 07:18 AM.