Match text up to given character but excluding character occurrence within single quotes in Perl

Question

I am trying to extract text from a string up to the next occurrence of a /, not counting slashes that occur within single quotes. For example

my $str="test 'a/b' c/ xxx /";
$str =~ /(.*?)\//;
print "$1\n";

gives

test 'a

whereas I would like to get:

test 'a/b' c

Answer 1

you can try this:

$str =~ /^((?>[^'\/]+|'[^']*')*)\//;