Question

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Regular Expression to find a string included between two characters, while EXCLUDING the delimiters

I have a function where I have to get text which is enclosed in square brackets but not brackets for example

this is [test] line i [want] text [inside] square [brackets]

from the above line I want words:

test
want
inside
brackets

I am trying with to do this with /\[(.*?)\]/g but I am not getting satisfied result, I get the words inside brackets but also brackets which are not what I want

I did search for some similar type of question on SO but none of those solution work properly for me here is one what found (?<=\[)[^]]+(?=\]) this works in RegEx coach but not with JavaScript. Here is reference from where I got this

here is what I have done so far: demo

please help.

Answer 1

A single lookahead should do the trick here:

 a = "this is [test] line i [want] text [inside] square [brackets]"
 words = a.match(/[^[\]]+(?=])/g)

but in a general case, exec or replace-based loops lead to simpler code:

words = []
a.replace(/\[(.+?)\]/g, function($0, $1) { words.push($1) })