Regex to match " but not \"

Question

I'm always completely at loss with regexes so I hope someone here can help.

Joomla uses this regex to validate lines of ini files:

/^(|(\[[^\]]*\])|([A-Z][A-Z0-9_\-]*\s*=(\s*(("[^"]*")|(_QQ_)))+))\s*(;.*)?$/

The lines have this format

JLIB_LOGIN_AUTHENTICATE="Username and password do not match or you do not have an account yet."

Obviously " can't be allowed in the value part but \" could be. Currently this is matched by the above regex. I can see how it's matched but I can't modify the regex not to match \". I tried adding |(\Q\"\E)to various places but no luck.

Answer 1

Change this:

"[^"]*"

To this:

"(\\"|[^"])*"

See it working online: ideone

Answer 2

replace [^"] with ([^"]|(\\"))