Take a look at perlre - Regular Expressions, Subsection Quantifiers, Second to last paragraph.

The most efficient way to capture a single or double quoted string is to use an independent subexpression to avoid backtracking. The below example will also avoid the case where the backslash is escaped itself.


use strict;

my $single_quote_re = qr{
    '
    (?:
        (?> [^\\']+ )
    |
        \\ .
    )*
    '
}sx;

# Normal String
my $line = qq{Test #1 'Show me Waynes world','Jennys Basketball shoes'
+\n};
print $line;
$line =~ s/$single_quote_re/SSS/g;
print $line;

# Escaped single quotes embedded
$line = qq{Test #2 'Show me Wayne\\'s world','Jenny\\'s Basketball sho
+es'\n};
print $line;
$line =~ s/$single_quote_re/SSS/g;
print $line;

# Literal backslash before closing single quote
$line = qq{Test #2 'Show me Waynes world\\\\','Jenny\\'s Basketball sh
+oes'\n};
print $line;
$line =~ s/$single_quote_re/SSS/g;
print $line;
__END__

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- Miller

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

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