Regex to match all instances not inside quotes

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Actually, you can match all instances of a regex not inside quotes for any string, where each opening quote is closed again. Say, as in you example above, you want to match \+.

The key observation here is, that a word is outside quotes if there are an even number of quotes following it. This can be modeled as a look-ahead assertion:

\+(?=([^"]*"[^"]*")*[^"]*$)

Now, you’d like to not count escaped quotes. This gets a little more complicated. Instead of [^"]* , which advanced to the next quote, you need to consider backslashes as well and use [^"\\]*. After you arrive at either a backslash or a quote, you need to ignore the next character if you encounter a backslash, or else advance to the next unescaped quote. That looks like (\\.|"([^"\\]*\\.)*[^"\\]*"). Combined, you arrive at

\+(?=([^"\\]*(\\.|"([^"\\]*\\.)*[^"\\]*"))*[^"]*$)

I admit it is a little cryptic. =)

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