Question

I’m trying to complete a regular expression that will pull out matches based on their opening and closing characters, the closest I’ve gotten is

^(\[\[)[a-zA-Z.-_]+(\]\])

Which will match a string such as “[[word1]]” and bring me back all the matches if there is more than one, The problem is I want it to pick up matchs where there may be a space in so for example “[[word1 word2]]”, now this will work if I add a space into my pattern above however this pops up a problem that it will only get one match for my entire string so for example if I have a string

"Hi [[Title]] [[Name]] [[surname]], How are you"

then the match will be [[Title]] [[Name]] [[surname]] rather than 3 matches [[Title]], [[Name]], [[surname]]. I’m sure I’m just a char or two away in the Regex but I’m stuck, How can I make it return the 3 matches.

Thanks

Answer 1

You just need to make you regex non-greedy by using a ? like:

^(\[\[)[a-zA-Z.-_ ]+?(\]\])

Also there is a bug in your regex. You’ve included - in the char class thinking of it as a literal hyphen. But - in a char class is a meta char. So it effectively will match all char between . (period) and _ (underscore). So you need to escape it as:

^(\[\[)[a-zA-Z.\-_ ]+?(\]\])

or you can put is in some other place in the regex so that it will not have things on both sides of it as:

^(\[\[)[a-zA-Z._ -]+?(\]\])

or

^(\[\[)[-a-zA-Z._ ]+?(\]\])