The issue for me here is to capture the content inside single quotes(like 'xyz').
But the apostrophe which is the same symbol as a single quote(') is coming in the way!
The regex I've written is : /(\w\'\w)(*SKIP)(*F)|(\'[^\']*\')/
The example i have used is : Hello ma'am 'This is Prashanth's book.'
What needs to be captured is : 'This is Prashanth's book.'.
But, what's capured is : 'This is Prashanth'!
Here is the link of what i tried on online regex tester
Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you!
You can't use [^\'] to capture a text that contains ' with in and in your example, This is Prashanth's book. contains a ' character within the text. You need to modify your regex to use .*? instead of [^\'] and can write your regex as this,
(\w'\w)(*SKIP)(*F)|('.*?'\B)
Also, you don't need to escape a single quote ' as that has no special meaning in regex.
From your example, it is not clear whether you want the captured match to contain ' around the match or not. In case you don't want ' to be captured in the match, you can use a lookarounds based regex and use this,
(?<=\B').*?(?='\B)
Explanation of regex:
(?<=\B') - This positive look behind ensures what gets captured in match is preceded by a single quote which is not preceded by a word character which is ensured by \B.*? - Captures the text in non-greedy manner(?='\B) - Ensures the matched text is followed by a single quote and \B ensures it doesn't match a quote that is immediately followed by any word character. E.g. it won't match an ending quote like 's