Question

I have a string with several placeholder tokens like so:

"hello $(firstname) $(lastname), you're on StackOverflow!";

Simples 🙂 I’m trying to write a regex that will look at a string like the above, and return all of the tokens which exist. For example in this case the return value should be { "firstname", "lastname" }.

I’m a beginner with Regex, this is what I tried to write:

"\$\(.+?\)"

However the matches include the $ and brackets, eg: { "$(firstname)", "$(lastname)" }

How can I modify the regex so that it only returns the text inside the brackets? I looked at this question for guidance but I cannot see how that regex works differently than mine.

Answer 1

without grouping:

'(?<=\$\()[^)]+(?=\))'

test with grep:

kent$  grep -Po '(?<=\$\()[^)]+(?=\))' v 
firstname
lastname

or see it live here: http://regexr.com?2vke8