[regex help] I want to find whatever is inside brackets "[ ]" and the brackets themselves

codenotworking

This is the basic regex i have “(?=.)[[\w-\s]”.

I want to be able to find what’s inside the brackets “[ ]” and the brackets themselves, so I can replace them with whatever I wish. For example:

lorem ipsum [lorem-ipsum lor-em ip sum] 12345end --> lorem ipsum REPLACED TEXT 12345end

Any help would be appreciated.

Alan Kilborn

@codenotworking

The basic regex you showed is F’d up due to markdown syntax used on this site.

I would try this regex:

\[[^]]+\]

It looks very strange but it just might work. Note that it isn’t overly restrictive, pretty much anything inside the square brackets and the brackets themselves will be selected.

guy038

Hello, @codenotworking, @alan-kilborn, and All,

If you don’t want the regex to match multi lines [.............] blocks, which begins on a line and ends, on a further line, change the Alan Kilborn’s regex to this new one :

\[[^]\r\n]+\]

A second formulation could be :

(?s)\[.+?\], which allows multi-lines [.............] blocks
(?-s)\[.+?\], which allows mono-lines [.............] blocks, only

The first regex searches for the smallest range of any character, including EOL ones, different from, either, [ and ], after the [ symbol, till the ] symbol

The second regex searches for the smallest range of any standard character,( not line-breaks ), different from, either, [ and ], after the [ symbol, till the ] symbol

BTW, @codenotworking, + 1 for your name’s choice ! The true nightmare of any coder ;-))

Best Regards,

guy038

Alan Kilborn

@guy038

Yep…but so many things left unspecified by the OP…

codenotworking

@Alan-Kilborn
Thanks. This works perfectly for my needs.

@guy038
Thanks for the suggestion and the props.