RegEx: Grabbing values between quotation marks

I would go for:

"([^"]*)"

The [^"] is regex for any character except '"'
The reason I use this over the non greedy many operator is that I have to keep looking that up just to make sure I get it correct.


In general, the following regular expression fragment is what you are looking for:

"(.*?)"

This uses the non-greedy *? operator to capture everything up to but not including the next double quote. Then, you use a language-specific mechanism to extract the matched text.

In Python, you could do:

>>> import re
>>> string = '"Foo Bar" "Another Value"'
>>> print re.findall(r'"(.*?)"', string)
['Foo Bar', 'Another Value']

I've been using the following with great success:

(["'])(?:(?=(\\?))\2.)*?\1

It supports nested quotes as well.

For those who want a deeper explanation of how this works, here's an explanation from user ephemient:

([""']) match a quote; ((?=(\\?))\2.) if backslash exists, gobble it, and whether or not that happens, match a character; *? match many times (non-greedily, as to not eat the closing quote); \1 match the same quote that was use for opening.

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Regex