Question

All-

I love regex quite a bit, but when there are multiple types of parsing I get quite confused.

I’m basically trying to parse data such as this:

{"classs":15,"commondrop":true,"id":7101,"level":1,"name":"7Z",
 "slot":0,"source":[2],"subclass":0, 
 modes: { "mode":4,
          "4": { "count":15862,"outof":36461 }
        },
 count:15862, stack:[1,1]
}, 
{"classs":15,"commondrop":true,"id":62530,"level":1,"name":"7Z",
 "slot":0,"source":[2],"subclass":0,
  modes:{ "mode":4,
          "4":{ "count":13402,"outof":36461 }
        },
  count:13402,stack:[1,1]
},
{"classs":15,"commondrop":true,"id":3300,"level":5,"name":"7Rabbit's Foot",
 "slot":0,"source":[2],"subclass":0,
  modes:{"mode":4,
         "4":{ "count":1,"outof":36461 }
        },
  count:1,stack:[1,1] 
}
]});

Since there are sub brackets (the { and }) I’m not entirely sure how to ONLY get what is in the outter bracket. So I would just want to get this out of it:

"classs":15,"commondrop":true,"id":7101,"level":1,"name":"7Z","slot":0,"source":[2],"subclass":0,modes:{"mode":4,"4":{"count":15862,"outof":36461}},count:15862,stack:[1,1]

(which I could then parse further and break it down more)

Is this even possible with regex? I started off trying something like \{"classs"(.*?)\},{ but it misses some of the data.

Answer 1

counting brackets is not possible with regular expressions, because these aren’t regular languages. The solution will be to use i.e. a Parsing Expression Grammar implementation instead of a RegEx.