Regex pattern for adding N before string value in sql statement

Question

I need help with the regex pattern to add N before all string values in sql-statements

For example:

Before: SELECT * FROM table WHERE column = '123';
After: SELECT * FROM table WHERE column = N'123';

In that example, I can use this pattern: '[^']+'. However, I need help with pattern for this example:

Before: SELECT * FROM table WHERE column1 = 'One''Two' AND column2 = 'abc';
After: SELECT * FROM table WHERE column1 = N'One''Two' AND column2 = N'abc';

If there's a double '', it should skip those.

Information about my problem: You must precede all Unicode strings with a prefix N when you deal with Unicode string constants in SQL Server

Answer 1

Well, you could use something like this to satisfy the above (provided whatever you're using to apply it supports a negative lookbehind:

(?<!')'[\w]+?'

It's using a negative lookbehind to exclude captures between ' and ' that are preceded by another '. You may have to adapt the \w if you required spaces/other characters.

Edit (Updated answer to include your extra strings from the comments):

You could try:

(?<=\s)'.*?'

Which will capture zero or more characters occurring between ' characters (ungreedy), and uses a positive lookbehind to ensure the first ' is preceded by a space character, which should satisfy all the strings you've listed.

You could optionally add a negative lookahead on the end (?!\w) to skip over the ' in O'Connor.