Regex brackets and brackets next to eachother

Question

I'm a regex novice and I cannot figure out how to match the following:

String example:

"This is my string [something: something] and the string is very pretty [something: something][a][b][c]."

At the moment I got a regex that matches all start and end square brackets. \[([^]]*)\].

This yields the following

I want to group standalone brackets and brackets which has brackets next to it.

The regex should group it like;

Anyone able to help?

special regex characters can be backslashed if you want to find those characters. `[a-c]*` will find `abc` but `\[a-c\]` will find `[a-c]` — LukStorms, Jun 08 '16 at 10:13
To group you can use [groups](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3512471/what-is-a-non-capturing-group): `(?:\[[^\]]*\])+` — bobble bubble, Jun 08 '16 at 10:13
If you need the contents in between the square brackets, use `(?:\[([^]]*)])+` and access the CaptureCollection. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Jun 08 '16 at 10:16
@bobblebubble that was exactly what i was looking for! Thanks alot! — user3249398, Jun 08 '16 at 10:20
@user3249398: Your regex contains a capturing group. Do you need to capture the contents in-between each `[...]`? — Wiktor Stribiżew, Jun 08 '16 at 10:32

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 08 '16 at 10:17

2

You can do:

((?:\[[^]]*\])+)

The non-captured group (?:\[[^]]*\]) matches [, then any number of characters upto ] and then ]
The captured group ((?:\[[^]]*\])+) matches one or more occurrence of the non-captured group

answered Jun 08 '16 at 10:17

heemayl

Nice. I was thinking about doing lookaheads to not match a closing ] if it had a following [ and things like that. This is a much simpler solution than mine would have been. :) – Chris Jun 08 '16 at 10:23

1 Answers1