Using regular expressions
I’m working on a translation tool for Duik 15 (it is the last thing I have to develop to finish it); instead of including the translations inside Duik, I decided to develop a framework to translate any Adobe ExtendScript.
I’ll talk about this framework later, for now, what I needed was a simple yet reliable tool to extract all strings from the script to translate. Which leads me to what I want to share now:
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A wonderful site to write and test (and share) your regular expressions : Regexr (v2)
If you develop some scripts and tools but don’t know what a regular expression is, I think you should look at it! It’s a very powerful and versatile tool (search, replacement, validation…)
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Here is a useful regular expression which matches any string surrounded by double quotes in Javascript (therefore in Adobe ExtendScript too), including strings containing escaped quotes (
\").Here it is:
\"([^\"\\]*(?:\\.[^\"\\]*)*?)\"Quick explanation:\": find the first double quote[^\"\\]*: All characters coming next which are not a backslash nor a double quote.(?:\\.[^\"\\]*): a block to get backslashes and the character coming next (\\.), then once again any character coming next which are not a backslash nor a double quote ([^\"\\]*)*: at last, this block is repeated until a final double quote is found (\")
