How do I get all the matches in tcl using regexp command? For example I have a string as following

set line "foo \"aaa\"zz bar \"aaa:ccc\" ccc"
puts $line
foo "aaa"zz bar "aaa:ccc" ccc

I now want to get aaa and aaa:ccc. There could be any number of such matches. I tried

regexp -all -inline {"(.*)"} $line 
{"aaa"zz bar "aaa:ccc"} {aaa"zz bar "aaa:ccc}

But as seen this didn't work. What's the right way to get multiple matches and match everything within double quotes?

CodePudding user response：

You can capture all between two quotes with "([^"]*)" pattern. When using the pattern with regexp -all -inline:

set matches [regexp -all -inline {"([^"]*)"} $line]

you will get all overall match values and all the captured substrings.

You will have to post-process the matches in order to get the final list of captures:

set line "foo \"aaa\"zz bar \"aaa:ccc\" ccc"
set matches [regexp -all -inline {"([^"]*)"} $line]
set res {}
foreach {match capture} $matches {
    lappend res $capture
}
puts $res

See the online Tcl demo.

Output:

aaa aaa:ccc

CodePudding user response：

An alternate method to extract the quoted strings is:

set unquoted [lmap quoted [regexp -all -inline {".*?"} $line] {string trim $quoted {"}}]

Or, split the string using quote as the delimiter, and take every second field.

set unquoted [lmap {a b} [split $line {"}] {set b}]

That gives you a trailing empty element since this split invocation results in a list with an odd number of elements.