Regex to get string between curly braces "{I want what's between the curly braces}"

Question

Hi, unfortunately despite having tried to learn regex at least one time a year for as many years as I can remember, I always forget as I use them so infrequently.This year my new years resolution is to not try and learn regex again - So this year to save me from tears I'll give it to stackoverflow. (Last Christmas remix).

So basically I want to pass in a string in this format "{getThis}", and be returned the string "getThis". Could anyone be of assistance in helping to stick to my new years resolution?

Regards,

Chris

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Related (but not identical) questions on stackoverflow:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/346567/how-can-one-turn-regular-quotes-i-e-into-latex-tex-quotes-i-e
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1237/regex-to-pull-out-a-section-a-substing-from-a-string-between-two-tags
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/328387/regex-to-replace-all-n-in-a-string-but-no-those-inside-code-code-tag

and probably others.

Answer 1

Try

/{(.*?)}/

That means, match any character between { and }, but don't be greedy - match the shortest string which ends with } (the ? stops * being greedy). The parentheses let you extract the matched portion.

Another way would be

/{([^}]*)}/

This matches any character except a } char (another way of not being greedy)

Answer 2

If your string will always be of that format, a regex is overkill:

>>> var g='{getThis}';
>>> g.substring(1,g.length-1)
"getThis"

Answer 3

/\{([^}]+)\}/

/        -    delimiter
\{      -    opening literal brace escaped because it is a special character used for quatifiers eg {2,3}
(        -    start capturing
[^}]  -    character class consisting of
    ^      -    not
    }       -    a closing brace (no escaping necessary because special characters in a character class are different)

+      -    one or more of the character class
)       -     end capturing
\}     -     the closing literal brace
/       -     delimiter

Answer 4

This one works in Textmate and it matches everything in a CSS file between the curly brackets.

\{(\s*?.*?)*?\}

selector {. . matches here including white space. . .}

If you want to further be able to return the content, then wrap it all in one more set of parentheses like so:

\{((\s*?.*?)*?)\}

and you can access the contents via $1.

This also works for functions, but I haven't tested it with nested curly brackets.

Answer 5

This was the question:

"So basically I want to pass in a string in this format "{getThis}", and be returned the string "getThis".

All of the examples above return {getThis}, not getThis. Excluding the opening and closing brackets is the tricky part!

If anyone can figure it out, well that would be nice.

Answer 6

If you're using PHP and you have the following strings and want to extract the albumid.

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/entry/base/user/user/albumid/5241920314542926625?alt=rss&hl=en_US
http://picasaweb.google.com/data/entry/base/user/user/albumid/5200211976033472801?alt=rss&hl=en_US

preg_match('/albumid\/(.*?)\?/',$item->guid, $match);

$match would contain something like this.

Array ( [0] => albumid/5241920314542926625? [1] => 5241920314542926625 )
Array ( [0] => albumid/5200211976033472801? [1] => 5200211976033472801 ) 

So basically use match[1] to get the value that you need inside your delimiter.