Regex Problem

Hi Everyone,

Im having a little problem with a peice of regex im trying to write... im a profficent coder when it comes to HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and AS2/AS3 but the one thing that still trips me up again and again is regex!

Im trying to write a peice of regex that will be used with preg_replace to remove all "[" characters from a string as long as they don't appear within double (") or single (') quotes or a blackslash(\). When appearing in quotes it ([) could have any characters (a-zA-Z0-9/,.\;[]-_()*&^%$#@!`~<>?{}|) either side of it within the quotes. How would I do this? I have included the regex I tried to create to solve this problem but it doesn't quite work. I hope i'm on the right track...

Code:

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[^[["|'][^"|']*\[[^"|']*["|']]]

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I feel im almost on the right track but im not quite there. Any and all help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Chris

Someone with better regex skills can probably come up with a one liner, but here's how I'd do it:

PHP Code:

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$matches = (preg_split('/([\'"].+?[\'"])/', $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE));
$new = '';
foreach ($matches as $match) {
    if (strpos($match, '"') === 0 || strpos($match, "'") === 0) {
        // stuff inside quotes can be handled here
        $new .= $match;
        continue;
    }
    // stuff outside quotes can be handled here
    $new .= str_replace('[', '', $match);
} 


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