Question

I need 2 simple reg exps that will:

1. Match if a string is contained within square brackets ([] e.g [word])
2. Match if string is contained within double quotes ("" e.g "word")

Answer 1

\[\w+\]

"\w+"

Explanation:

The \[ and \] escape the special bracket characters to match their literals.

The \w means “any word character”, usually considered same as alphanumeric or underscore.

The + means one or more of the preceding item.

The ” are literal characters.

NOTE: If you want to ensure the whole string matches (not just part of it), prefix with ^ and suffix with $.

And next time, you should be able to answer this yourself, by reading regular-expressions.info

Update:

Ok, so based on your comment, what you appear to be wanting to know is if the first character is [ and the last ] or if the first and last are both ” ?
If so, these will match those:

^\[.*\]$    (or ^\\[.*\\]$ in a Java String)

"^.*$"

However, unless you need to do some special checking with the centre characters, simply doing:

if ( MyString.startsWith("[") && MyString.endsWith("]") )

and

if ( MyString.startsWith("\"") && MyString.endsWith("\"") )

Which I suspect would be faster than a regex.