If you have a text enclosed with single or double quotes and optionally containing escaped quotes inside the text, the following regular expression will help you to extract the text: (['"])(?<text>.*?)(?<!\\)\1 For example, parsing text: 'Hello world'  'World\'s test' "World's test" will yield following results: Hello world World\’s test World’s test Technorati Tags: Regular Expressions

In some situations when using scripts to create/update database in code, I had to split input SQL script file by GO statements, as SqlCommand doesn’t really understand it. But in some place, I’ve came to a strange-looking code that does exactly that but… in really weird and NOT correct way. So here we go. How NOT to write: //separator char not used in TSQL char ch = '^';   //Ed: str is the text from SQL batch file ...

Many applications write various information into log files and sometimes this information is sensitive, e.g. contains user passwords. In my case, I knew that we are logging SQL statements with stored procedures calls and one of the parameters may contain user’s password. So I have been asked to replace such passwords with something neutral. I’ve ended with following regular expression string (works only for stored procedures and alike call logs!): (?<Pre>(pass(word)?|pwd)[^=']*=[^']*'?)(?<Target>[^']+)(?<Post>'?) Technorati Tags: Regular Expressions, CSHarp, C#