Question

So I have a set of data that can look like this (sample line-by-line):

verkoop
verkoop [Hot News]
verkoop [Hot News] [Smurf]
verkoop test
verkoop test [Hot News]
verkoop test [Hot News] [Smurf]

what I want is for all the text (in this example it can be either verkoop or verkoop test) and all the tags (example: [Hot News] or [Hot News] [Smurf]) to be separated (in groups preferrably but eventually I just need these in an array in C#).

The text can remain 1 group but each tag must form it’s own group.

I’ve tried to mess around with a regular expression but can’t seem to be able to make it work with more than 1 tag (for example [Hot News] [Smurf]).
This is what I came up with:

^([a-zA-Z0-9\s]*)\s?(((?:[\[]{1}[a-zA-Z\s]+[\]]{1}\s?)*))$

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

If the tags are always at the end of the string, you could simply split on the first occurrence of [, if it exists.

using System;

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        string s = "verkoop test [Hot News] [Smurf]";
        int i = s.IndexOf('[');
        if(i > -1)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(s.Substring(0, i));
            Console.WriteLine(s.Substring(i));
        }
    }
}

which prints:

verkoop test 
[Hot News] [Smurf]