Can you use back references in the pattern part of a regular expression?
- by Camsoft
I there a way to back reference in the regular expression pattern?
Example input string:
Here is "quoted text" some quoted text.
Say I want to pull out the quoted text, I could create the following expression:
"([^"]+)"
This regular expression would match quoted text.
Say I want it to also support single quotes, I could change the expression to:
["']([^"']+)["']
But what if the input string has a mixture of quotes say Here is 'quoted text" some quoted text. I would not want the regex to match. Currently the regex in the second example would still match.
What I would like to be able to do is if the first quote is a double quote then the closing quote must be a double. And if the start quote is single quote then the closing quote must be single.
Can I use a back reference to achieve this?
