Question

I need to create a formatting documentation. I know the regex that are used to format the text but I don’t know how to reproduce an example for that regex.
This one should be an internal link:

'{\[((?:\#|/)[^ ]*) ([^]]*)\]}'

Can anyone create an example that would match this, and maybe explain how he got it. I got stuck at ‘?’.

I never used this meta-character at the beginning, usually I use it to mark that an literal cannot appear or appear exactly once.

Thanks

Answer 1

(?:...) has the same grouping effect as (...), but without “capturing” the contents of the group; see http://php.net/manual/en/regexp.reference.subpatterns.php.

So, (?:\#|/) means “either # or /“.

I’m guessing you know that [^ ]* means “zero or more characters that aren’t SP”, and that [^]]* means “zero or more characters that aren’t right-square-brackets”.

Putting it together, one possible string is this:

'{[/abcd asdfasefasdc]}'