Why regex not removing everything in the parenthesis?

Question

Why is this regex is not removing everything in the parenthesis?

Regex expression:

[\(\[].*?[\)\]]

Test string:

Firstname Lastename @username ([tesstt](weblinke))

Result of the expression:

Firstname Lastename @username )

It leaves the closing parenthesis.

Because it is non greedy with `.*?` and stop at the first parenthesis — The fourth bird, Feb 10 '23 at 19:26
You can find more info here, it is basically the opposite https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2503413/regular-expression-to-stop-at-first-match — The fourth bird, Feb 10 '23 at 19:38
thank you i got it to work by changing to greedy [\(\[].*[\)\]] — Jcheong, Feb 10 '23 at 19:41
Note that that won't work if you have multiple parentheses like `foo (abc) bar (def)`. It will remove `bar` as well. — Barmar, Feb 10 '23 at 19:58

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 11 '23 at 00:28

What you want to do is to substitute anything (or nothing) within parentheses with nothing.

For example, in Vim, it would be:

:s/([A-Za-z0-9\.]*)//g

Or you could use sed:

sed -i 's/([A-Za-z0-9\.]*)//g' name_of_file.txt

There are other ways to accomplish it as well, but the general pattern is the same. Note, the way I have it limits the stuff between the parentheses to alphanumeric characters and/or periods, but you can add other special characters if you need to. (example, an exclamation point)

Why regex not removing everything in the parenthesis?

1 Answers1