Question

How can I create a regular expression that will grab delimited text from a string? For example, given a string like

text ###token1### text text ###token2### text text  

I want a regex that will pull out ###token1###. Yes, I do want the delimiter as well. By adding another group, I can get both:

(###(.+?)###) 

Answer 1

/###(.+?)###/ 

if you want the ###’s then you need

/(###.+?###)/ 

the ? means non greedy, if you didn’t have the ?, then it would grab too much.

e.g. '###token1### text text ###token2###' would all get grabbed.

My initial answer had a * instead of a +. * means 0 or more. + means 1 or more. * was wrong because that would allow ###### as a valid thing to find.

For playing around with regular expressions. I highly recommend http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/ for windows. You can type in the string you want and your regular expression and see what it’s actually doing.

Your selected text will be stored in \1 or $1 depending on where you are using your regular expression.