Question

I have a text that will contain strings surrounded by #[ ]. I need to match these strings and find out the string inside.

My example text:

Lorem ipsum dolor #[This is my first string.] sit amet, consectetur elit,
sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt #[This is my second string?] ut et dolore magna.

With this text I would like to have two matches:

#[This is my first string.]
#[This is my second string?]

Now I have written my regular expression:

\#\[([\w\s\W]*)\]

I added \W because I would like to include dots, question marks and other characters that is not a letter. This causes me a problem because now #, [ and ] is included which results in my text to have only one match:

#[This is my first string.] sit amet, consectetur elit,
sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt #[This is my second string?]

Of course it matches on the first occurrence of #[ and the last occurrence of ].
How to solve this? I can accept to not include #, [ and ] in my strings but all other none-letter character should be included if that is possible.

Answer 1

Your problem is not the \W, it’s the *. The * is greedy and will match the longest string possible. So it matches the first [ with the last ] and takes everything in between.

Try this:

\#\[([\w\s\W]*?)\]

In fact, you should be able to simplify it to just:

\#\[(.*?)\]

The ? after a qualifier (* or +) will force minimal matches. I.e. non-greedy.