Question

I have strings of this type:

text (more text)

What I would like to do is to have a regular expression that extracts the “more text” segment of the string. So far I have been using this regular expression:

"^.*\\((.*)\\)$"

Which although it works on many cases, it seems to fail if I have something of the sort:

text (more text (even more text))

What I get is: even more text)

What I would like to get instead is:
more text (even more text) (basically the content of the outermost pair of brackets.)

Answer 1

Besides lazy quantification, another way is:

"^[^(]*\\((.*)\\)$"

In both regexes, there is a explicitly specified left parenthesis ("\\(", with Java String escaping) immediately before the matching group. In the original, there was a .* before that, allowing anything (including other left parentheses). In mine, left parentheses are not allowed here (there is a negated character class), so the explicitly specified left parenthesis in the outermost.