Question

i’ve got regex which was alright, but as it camed out doesn’t work well in some situations

Keep eye on message preview cause message editor do some tricky things with ‘\’

[\[]?[\^%#\$\*@\-;].*?[\^%#\$\*@\-;][\]]

its task is to find pattern which in general looks like that

[ABA]

• A – char from set ^,%,#,$,*,@,-,;
• B – some text
• [ and ] are included in pattern

is expected to find all occurences of this pattern in test string

Black fox [#sample1#] [%sample2%] – [#sample3#] eats blocks.

but instead of expected list of matches

• ‘[#sample1#]’
• ‘[%sample2%]’
• ‘[#sample3#]’

I get this

• ‘[#sample1#]’
• ‘[%sample2%]’
• ‘- [#sample3#]’

And it seems that this problem will occur also with other chars in set ‘A’. So could somebody suggest changes to my regex to make it work as i need?

and less important thing, how to make my regex to exclude patterns which look like that

[ABC]

• A – char from set ^,%,#,$,*,@,-,;
• B – some text
• C – char from set ^,%,#,$,*,@,-,; other than A
• [ and ] are included in pattern

for example

[$sample1#] [%sample2@] [%sample3;]

thanks in advance

MTH

Answer 1

 \[([%#$*@;^-]).+?\1\] 

applied to text:

 Black fox [#sample1#] [%sample2%] - [#sample3#] [%sample4;] eats blocks. 

matches

• [#sample1#]
• [%sample2%]
• [#sample3#]
• but not [%sample4;]

EDIT

This works for me (Output as expected, regex accepted by C# as expected):

Regex re = new Regex(@'\[([%#$*@;^-]).+?\1\]'); string s = 'Black fox [#sample1#] [%sample2%] - [#sample3#] [%sample4;] eats blocks.';  MatchCollection mc = re.Matches(s); foreach (Match m in mc) {   Console.WriteLine(m.Value); }