Regular expression for capturing a "C-style" string

Question

I have started to learn automata theory and languages. I am new to regular expressions.

As a use case in real world, I would like to construct a regular expression to accept a c-style string: enclosed by double quotes, allows escape sequences (\" to escape a double quote, \ escape a backslash, \n escape a new line...) and allows all characters in between, and pretty much everything that the standard identifies as a string literal.

I don't have a specific language that the regex is to be used in, for I'm not going to use this in a program. I just want to know the theory behind constructing the regex, one step at a time. For example, Initially, how to account for the enclosing quotes ? then how to allow arbitrary sequences of characters between the quotes ? and then how to account for escaping ?

I don't have a regex tester. I just need the construction idea.

Strings that are to be accepted are, for example,

"hello world!"
"hi!\n"
"000022lkjads\t{"
"\0Hello World"

The following would be rejected

"hello 

for there is no enclosing double quotes

"Hello World"" 

for it does not escape the quote

Answer 1

Here is a regular expression for the set of all strings of the following form:

• They start and end with ".
• Every " in the middle must be escaped using a backslash.
• Every backslash must be followed by a letter from $A$.
• All other letters are from $B$; in particular, " is not in $B$.

For simplicity, I identify $A$ and $B$ with the regular expressions $\sum_{\sigma \in A} \sigma$ and $\sum_{\tau \in B} \tau$.

Here is the regular expression: $$ \text"(B+\backslash A)^*\text" $$