A technique I often use for this sort of problem is to have the regex work its way over the problematic section one character at a time and use look around assertions to handle the quoting. Consider:

use warnings;
use strict;

my $line = qq{Test #1 'Show me Waynes world','Jennys Basketball shoes'
+\n};
print "< $line";
$line =~ s/(['"]).+?(['"])/$1SSS$2/g;
print "> $line";

$line = qq{Test #2 'Show me Wayne\\'s world','Jenny\\'s Basketball sho
+es'\n};
print "< $line";
$line =~ s/(['"]) (?: (?! (?<!\\)\1 ) .)+ \1/$1SSS$1/gx;
print "> $line";

[download]

Prints:

< Test #1 'Show me Waynes world','Jennys Basketball shoes'
> Test #1 'SSS','SSS'
< Test #2 'Show me Wayne\'s world','Jenny\'s Basketball shoes'
> Test #2 'SSS','SSS'

[download]

Note that I removed to redundant sprintfs, showed before and after versions of the test strings, and fixed the quote issue in the second test string.

True laziness is hard work

In reply to Re: skip over an escaped single quote by GrandFather
in thread skip over an escaped single quote by bplegend

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