Strip brackets and the word "The" from a string

Question

I have been trying to figure out regex myself and to no avail can I get the last bracket to disappear from a string.

For example:

[The Day the Earth Stood Still]

I can only get:

Day the Earth Stood Still]

with the following RegEx code:

/(\[|\](^The ))\2/

I'm aiming for just:

Day the Earth Stood Still

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've spent 3 hours trying to figure it out on my own... This is me giving in. :3

Answer 1

You can try:

\[The\s(.*)]

If you need this to work to strip out brackets even when 'The' is not present you can try:

(?:\[The\s|\[)(.*)]

If you think you will run into a case where you may have 'the' or 'The' you can try:

(?:\[[Tt]he\s|\[)(.*)]

Here is some code to implement capturing text without the brackets and 'The':

var title = new Array();
title[0] = "[The Day the Earth Stood Still]";
title[1] = "[Independence Day]";
title[2] = "[the Day the Earth Stood Still]";

alert(title[0].match(/(?:\[[Tt]he\s|\[)(.*)]/)[1]);
alert(title[1].match(/(?:\[[Tt]he\s|\[)(.*)]/)[1]);
alert(title[2].match(/(?:\[[Tt]he\s|\[)(.*)]/)[1]);

Try it out here: http://jsfiddle.net/aSwYz/

Answer 2

Maybe you should take the approach of thinking of what you want to keep instead of what you want to get rid of

(?<=\[The\s*)[\w\s]*(?=\])

Otherwise, you are trying to do a match in separate parts of the string and should be done with 2 different matches