Regular expression to match text between either square or curly brackets

Question

Related to my previous question, I have a string on the following format:

this {is} a [sample] string with [some] {special} words. [another one]

What is the regular expression to extract the words within either square or curly brackets, ie.

{is}
[sample]
[some]
{special}
[another one]

Note: In my use case, brackets cannot be nested. I would also like to keep the enclosing characters, so that I can tell the difference between them when processing the results.

What if the string is `blah [{] blah {]}`? – kennytm Mar 08 '10 at 18:30 — kennytm, Mar 08 '10 at 18:30

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 08 '10 at 18:33

7

Simply or (|) the different things you wish to match together:

\[.*?\]|\{.*?\}

answered Mar 08 '10 at 18:33

Robert P

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Carl Norum · Answer 2 · 2010-03-08T18:34:31.977

2

This one seems to work:

[[{].*?[}\]]

Or this one:

\[.*?\]|{.*?}

If you want to catch the cases mentioned in the comments below.

You can use an online regex tester to try these things out. I think http://gskinner.com/RegExr/ is one of the more user-friendly options.

edited Mar 08 '10 at 18:34

answered Mar 08 '10 at 18:28

Carl Norum

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This will fail in the case of [ ... }. – Robert P Mar 08 '10 at 18:31
Edited to remove an extraneous `\`. – Carl Norum Mar 08 '10 at 18:31
@Carl, no he said [{foo} [bar]] (example of nesting) didn't happen. – Matthew Flaschen Mar 08 '10 at 18:33
Brackets can't be nested means to me [ [ ] ], which is a classic case that regular expressions fail on. – Robert P Mar 08 '10 at 18:33
His example string doesn't contain such a thing. I will edit to change that. – Carl Norum Mar 08 '10 at 18:34
1

@Carl: You can match a [ with `\[`. Why use `[[]`? – kennytm Mar 08 '10 at 18:36
@Kenny, changed - I was just editing my previous entry, should be fixed already. – Carl Norum Mar 08 '10 at 18:37

Regular expression to match text between either square or curly brackets

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