[RESOLVED] Regex problem

[Disyne]

I guess this is more of a regex in general problem then vb.net...anyways.

I am trying to think of a regex replace to replace double quotes with nothing. Example:

hello("hi there") would become hello(hi there)
"hi" would become hi
"example \"3" would become example \"3

-edit
Maybe an easier way to explain this is, replace all " that do not have a backslash before them.

[phibud]

Can't you use the string.replace function?

[chris128]

Yeah if you need to just remove all " then try something like this:

SomeString.Replace("""",String.Empty)

EDIT: Ah just seen your edit that mentions the \ character, give me a minute and I will post something that does what you are trying to do

[.paul.]

try this:

SomeString.Replace("""",String.Empty).replace("\", "\"")

its complicated using regex. "\" is used as an escape character. there probably is a way to do it but i don't know how.

[chris128]

Dammit Paul, I just spent ages putting together this cack handed mess and you go and do it in one line (although your code does assume that EVERY \ character should have a quote mark after it, which may not be the case)

Here is my miserable attempt, which seems to work but is a bit messy (I suck at using Regex so thought I would just use IndexOf and String.Remove ):

'Step 1 - copy the original string
Dim newstring As String = originalstring 
Dim counter As Integer = 0
 
'Step 2 - Keep looping through this code until there are no more quote marks found
        While counter > -1
            counter = newstring.IndexOf("""", counter)
            If counter = 0 Then
                newstring = newstring.Remove(counter, 1)
            ElseIf Not counter = -1 AndAlso Not newstring(counter - 1) = "\" Then
                newstring = newstring.Remove(counter, 1)
            ElseIf Not counter = -1 AndAlso newstring(counter - 1) = "\" Then
                counter += 1
            End If
        End While
 
'Step 3 - Show the result 
MessageBox.Show(newstring)

This assumes that the variable originalstring contains your string that has the quote marks etc in

[.paul.]

sorry Chris. yeah i did assume each \ should have a quotation mark after it.

[ForumAccount]

This is how you can do it with regex:

MessageBox.Show(Regex.Replace("""exa""mp""le"" \\""""3""", "(?<=[^\\]|^)""", String.Empty))

@paul, you escape an escape character by doubling it. IE: \\ matches \