Question

I have a large string with the content from a document. It contain a number of merge fields, and I would like to fetch them in order to generate the value for the merge fields.

The string could be like this:

string text = "This is a test with merge fields. [First_field], [Second_field] and [Third_field]. Not to forget the [Forth_field]."

The list I would like to get out of this, would be like this:

• [First_field]
• [Second_field]
• [Third_field]
• [Forth_field]

I know it can be done in Regex, but this is definitely not my strength. I have tried with the following code, but it seems to create a single result (from the first and last brackets):

Regex.Matches(text, @"\[.*\]", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

Answer 1

You are matching every character between [ and ]. That includes ], meaning you swallow every field. What you need is called lazy matching that can be done using a ? after the quantifier:

@"\[.*?\]"

Alternatively, you could just match any character except ], which is done using the negation of a character class [^]

@"\[[^\]]*\]"