extract escaped quoted strings

Hi, Have a potentially interesting question here, wondering if anyone has done this one before and could shed some light for me. I have a bit of PHP code that needs to extract some quoted strings, so, very simply: "hello" perfectly fine and works great but, it should also be able to extract "hel\"lo" bit more complex now Ideally, it would also handle "hel\\"lo" properly it should also handle "hel\\\"lo" Any ideason how to do this? attempts to write a PCRE to do this are so-far unsuccessful, i'm sure I could badger some PHP code into doing it perhaps, but i'd love some elegant PCRE solution that thus-far evades me :( Any ideas are appreciated. -Adam