DevKits

Extraction

Match a quoted string

Flags: g

Extract text between double quotes, handling escaped quotes inside.

Pattern

Regular expression

"(?:[^"\\]|\\.)*"

How it works

Matches a double-quoted string that may contain escape sequences like `\"` or `\\n`. Uses an alternation: non-quote/non-backslash, or a backslash followed by any character.

Matches

  • "hello"
  • "say \\"hi\\""
  • "line 1\nline 2"

Non-matches

  • "unterminated
  • no quotes

Common gotchas

This pattern is greedy and works line by line only if the string contains no unescaped newlines. For real code/JSON parsing, use a proper parser; regex-based string extraction breaks on edge cases.

Language snippets

JavaScript

const re = /"(?:[^"\\]|\\.)*"/g;

Python

re.findall(r'"(?:[^"\\]|\\.)*"', text)

Go

re := regexp.MustCompile(`"(?:[^"\\]|\\.)*"`)

Java

Pattern.compile("\"(?:[^\"\\\\]|\\\\.)*\"")

Related patterns

Try any pattern live in the Regex Tester