Re: Need help lexing string literal

doane@them.com (Jay Doane) writes:
>I'm no expert with regexps, so if someone can give me some pointers,
>the correct regexp for which I'm looking, or someplace that has lots
>of different examples, where I might better educate myself, I'd be
>most appreciative.


The right way to handle this is to think of a string as an opening quote,
some "string elements", and a closing quote. A string element is normally
a single character, but can be a multi-character sequence started by a
backslash. So here's an RE for C strings, with white space inserted for
clarity, and with all backslashes standing for themselves:


" ( [^"\] | \[\abfnrtv"] | \[0-7][0-7]?[0-7]? )* "


This does assume that all backslash-newline processing has been done first,
and that the RE is being matched against a single line (that being the way
my experimental C parser, from which the above is taken, did things).
--
| Henry Spencer
| henry@zoo.toronto.edu
--

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