Question

I am having some trouble writing a regex expression that will strip outer brackets from a string (I want to ensure any brackets within single/double quotes are preserved):

((0)) becomes 0
(0)   becomes 0
('[phone]') becomes '[phone]'

I have got two regexes to match the left and right hand outer brackets:

^[\(]*  -- matches out the left outer brackets
[\)]*$  -- matches out the right outer brackets

Is it possible to combine both into a single regex?

Answer 1

Yes, it’s not at all difficult, and your regex can be simplified as well, as you don’t need character classes:

^\(*|\)*$