Question

I need to match a string like [one, two, three, hello, foobar] and extract one, two, three, hello and foobar respectively.

How can this be achieved using Regular Expressions and Javascript?

I have tried \[((\w+)\s*,?\s*)*\] but this would also match [one two, three] (, missing) and I also do not know how to extract the (\w+) group for each match.

Answer 1

Maybe something like this?

var s = '[one, two, three, hello, fo obar]';
var words = s.replace(/^\s*\[\s*/, '') //remove [
             .replace(/\s*\]\s*$/, '') //remove ]
             .split(/\s*,\s*/);        // split by comma

Working example: http://jsbin.com/edijef

Of course, this gets more complicated if you have escaped commas in your text, since splitting is no longer an option.