I have this regex which scans a text for the word very
: (?i)(?:^|\W)(very)[\W$]
which works. My goal is to upgrade it and avoid doing a match if very is within quotes, standalone or as part of a longer block.
Now, I have this other regex which is matching anything NOT inside curly quotes: (?<![\S"])([^"]+)(?![\S"])
which also works.
My problem is that I cannot seem to combine them. For example the string:
Fred Smith very loudly said yesterday at a press conference that fresh peas will "very, very defintely not" be served at the upcoming county fair
. In this bit we have 3 instances of very
but I'm only interested in matching the first one and ignore the whole Smith quotation.