Regex for matching quotes and single quotes

Question

I'm currently writing a parser for ColdFusion code. I'm using a regex (in c#) to extract the name datasource attribute of the cfquery tag.

For the time being the regex is the following <cfquery\s.*datasource\s*=\s*(?:'|")(.*)(?:'|")

it works well for strings like <cfquery datasource="myDS" or <cfquery datasource='myDS'

But it gets crazy when parsing strings like <cfquery datasource="#GetSourceName('myDS')#"

Obviously the part of the regex (?:'|") is the cause. Is there a way to only match single quote when the first match was a single quote? And only match the double quote when the first match was a double quote?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Edit: I think this should work in C# you just need to do a back reference:

datasource\s*=\s*('|")(.*)(?:\1)

or perhaps

datasource\s*=\s*('|")(.*)(?:$1)

matches datasource="#GetSourceName('myDS')#" with a back reference to the first match with \1.

Of course, you cannot ignore the first capture group with ?: and still have this work. Also, you may want to set the lazy flag so as not to match additional "'s

Answer 2

I would suggest using two different regexes if possible, or splitting the regex in a different way.

For a single regex, considering the question @Mike posted, ("[^"]*")|('[^']*') Then you can parse out the quotes.

The other potential way of doing this is by using lookahead/lookbehind, but that tends to get messy and isn't universally supported.