The thing is that "hello"you" should not match because it has a " in the middle, which is what [^"] is taking care of.

I misread the question. If you're trying to reject strings with embedded quotes,

"What happens," he asked, "with a string like this?"
Do you reject this, or match "What happens," and "with a string like this?" ?

You've bitten of a problem that gets harder the closer you look at it.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Problem with regex from Learning Perl (3rd edition) by dws
in thread Problem with regex from Learning Perl (3rd edition) by slocate

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