Question

I have input strings that look something like these

inspect [foo - bar] with [errors - 15] 
create [doodle]
force delete [quux]

That is, lines which contain information within square brackets.

What I want is to take one of those lines at a time and get an array like

["inspect", "[foo - bar], "with", "[errors - 15]"]

Using a regular expression it’s easy to collect the bracketed expressions and the parts between the bracketed expressions separately:

var src = "inspect [foo - bar] with [errors - 15]"
var regexBracketed = /\[[a-zA-Z0-9_\- ]+\]/g;

// this returns an array of the bracketed expressions
console.log(src.match(regexBracketed));

// and this returns an array of the parts between the expressions
console.log(src.split(regexBracketed));

Is there a simple way to get everything in just one array? Maybe I’m attacking this entirely the wrong way.

Answer 1

are you referring to groups (capturing parentheses)? /(.*)/ ?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_Expressions#Using_Parenthesized_Substring_Matches

for example, if you want to capture the strings in the brackets, then you can use this:

var r=/^\s*[^\[\]]*\[([^\[\]]+)\](?:[^\[\]]*\[([^\[\]]*)\])?\s*$/;
var m = "inspect [foo - bar] with [errors - 15] ".match(r);
console.log(m[1], m[2]);

you can add \s* to the expression to trim whitespace too.