Sorry, folks, let me explain this better:

This is a language independent question. I have to replace the extra simple quotes of the string with backslashed simple quotes so the sql statement becomes valid.

The thing is this is a large text file (dozens of INSERT lines and just some of them have simple quotes), so I was wondering if there is a way to solve this little puzzle with a regex.

Since regexes are very similar between Perl and PHP I was looking for something that you can call a "generic regex".

The code part to execute the regex is easy to do in both languages.

Thanks for your help,

my ($author_nickname, $author_email) = ("DaWolf","erabbott\@terra.com.br") if ($author_name eq "Er Galvão Abbott");