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Please help me find the regex for the following pattern

Answer 1

+6 A:

You can use the following regex globally to find all the matches:

\[.*?\]

or

\[[^\]]*\]

Explanation:

\[ : [ is a meta char for the start of the char class, so to match a literal [ we need to escape it.
.*? : match everything in a non-greedy way.
\] : to match a literal ]
[^\]] : a char class that matches any char other than ]
[^\]]* : zero or more char of the above type.

codaddict 2010-03-20 16:19:00

Why have you stressed on the word 'globally'. Does that mean anything in regex world (i'm new to regex patterns)

Bragboy 2010-03-20 16:26:43

Since you want to find *all* such patterns, we need to match the regex globally. By default (at least in Perl and in PHP-using preg_match) the matching process stops once it finds one match. In Perl we use the *g* option to the regex and in PHP we use the preg_match_all function to do the matching globally.

codaddict 2010-03-20 16:29:40

Answer 2

+5 A:

Try this regular expression:

\[[^[\]]+]

A short explanation:

\[ matches a plain [
[^[\]]+ matches one or more arbitrary characters except [ and ]
] matches a plain ]

Gumbo 2010-03-20 16:19:19

Answer 3

+1 A:

/(\[[a-z0-9]+\])/i/

Rob 2010-03-20 16:19:39

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Please help me find the regex for the following pattern

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