regex - Regular expression to extract text between square brackets

Saturday, 3 June 2017

Answer

Simple regex 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 the square brackets, ie.

sample

some
another one

Note: In my use case, brackets cannot be nested.

Answer

You can use the following regex globally:

\[(.*?)\]

Explanation:

\[ : [ is a meta char and needs to be escaped if you want to match it literally.

\] : ] is a meta char and needs to be escaped if you want to match it literally.