RegExp to match Quotes inside CSV field values

Question

I've been wrestling for the last days to create a regular expression that would match the quotes (if there are any) in the filed values of a CSV file string.

I would want to match only the quotes or at least the whole field value. e.g. : "", " ,a "test" in a CSV string like this:

"ID","iManufacturer","iMPartNumber","iSerialNumber","iSimCategory"
"1","""","230-132-111AA"," " ","a "test""

The reason is to escape the quotes if they appear inside values so that the CSV file could be correctly parsed.

Without lookbehinds in JavaScript I find it hard to find the solution. So far I've come up with this:

(?:[^,\r\n\t\f]*)["]+(?:[^,\r\n\t\f]*)["]+(?:[^,\r\n\t\f]*)(?=",|"\s|"\S)

It almost matches the strings that I need (it also matches the start of the value quote) : """, " " ,"a "test". It does not match if on the last row, the last value contains quotes.

Any help? Or maybe other way of doing it?

Answer 1

You could use this regular expression:

"((?:[^,"\n]*?"[^,"\n]*?)+)"

You can find an in detail explanation here.

Hope that helps.