Question

I have the following string format:

[[TEXT|TEXT]] <-- the "|TEXT" is optional

And so far what works fine is:

/([^\[]+)(?=\]\])/

Which will return:

TEXT
or
TEXT|TEXT

I want to match up to “|TEXT” if it has been included and only ever match the left side of “|” or “]]” depending on which is first.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

UPDATE – if you only want to match what’s in the [[]] and not including the |TEXT if it’s there, try this:

([^|\[]+?)(?=(?:\]\]|\|))

Which is more-or-less your starting regex but it stops at a | or a ]].

Or if your regex flavour supports look-behinds you could do:

((?<=\[\[)([^\|]+?)(?=(?:\]\]|\|))

This just enforces that you match from [[ onwards. Not really necessary but a bit more unknown-content-proof.