Question

I’m currently trying to split a string in C# (latest .NET and Visual Studio 2008), in order to retrieve everything that’s inside square brackets and discard the remaining text.

E.g.: ‘H1-receptor antagonist [HSA:3269] [PATH:hsa04080(3269)]’

In this case, I’m interested in getting ‘HSA:3269‘ and ‘PATH:hsa04080(3269)‘ into an array of strings.

How can this be achieved?

Answer 1

Split won’t help you here; you need to use regular expressions:

// using System.Text.RegularExpressions; // pattern = any number of arbitrary characters between square brackets. var pattern = @'\[(.*?)\]'; var query = 'H1-receptor antagonist [HSA:3269] [PATH:hsa04080(3269)]'; var matches = Regex.Matches(query, pattern);  foreach (Match m in matches) {     Console.WriteLine(m.Groups[1]); } 

Yields your results.