Help with Regular Expression

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I'm kind of stuck on this one

I need to filter out "all" levels of square brackets with a leading character
= X[100*[5]] out of a string
After locking around found this :
(?<=X) (?\[(?>[^\[\]]+| \[ |\])*(?(number)(?!))\])

This works pretty good and seems to catch any level of brackets but now I discovered a Problem :-(
If I have two "matching sets" it will include them in a single match ..

Therefore X[100*[5]]Y[5/2]

will result in the Reg catching the whole line, but what I need , is to catch only the portion with the leading X (and not to include the second set with the leading Y)

Any ideas?

Posted 21-Nov-11 17:27pm

Georg Kohler

Updated 21-Nov-11 18:31pm

Mehdi Gholam

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Peter_in_2780 · Answer 1 · 2011-11-21T18:41:00

Look in your Regex documentation for "non-greedy". By default, matching operators are "greedy", that is they match as much as possible. What you need is non-greedy, which matches as little as possible. For example, looking at string 1234abc, the regex fragment \d+ matches 1234 but the non-greedy \d+? only matches 1. Use a tool like Expresso to build and test your regex.

Peter

Georg Kohler · Answer 2 · 2011-11-22T08:25:00

Solution 2

But isn't the greedy what makes this "work"? = capture as many [Bracket]levels as possible ??

Anyway- I'll look into it - maybe I just need to find another approach to capture the [brackets]

Thanks
Georg

Posted 22-Nov-11 8:25am

Georg Kohler

Comments

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 24-Jul-13 0:48am

How can this be an answer?
—SA