Regular Expression problem

eddyc

Hi,

I need to search a document for any length of text surrounded by square braces, basically [something like this] and [this] including the square braces, i'm not really familiar with regular expressions but i've been told i could do this with them, can anyone help???

Ginger

Get a lump of the sample text and use something like Expresso to build it (http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm). You can also use Regulazy by Roy Osherove (http://www.osherove.com/tools)

boars.ie

$ perl -ne 'while (/(\[[^]]*])/g) {print "$1\n";}' < /etc/lftp.conf | head -5
[\e[1;30m\]
[\[\e[0;34m\]
[\e[1m\]
[\e[37m\]
[\e[30m\]

Note, that it does not properly detect nesting.
Neither does it support multiline strings (but it is less related to regex itself)

AARRRGH

It'd be worth reading the basics of regex as well:

http://www.regular-expressions.info/

E39MSport

[crmadm@PRODUCTION] # cat wibble
[ken was here]
[was he?]
yes he was
[crmadm@PRODUCTION] # grep '^\[.*\]$' wibble
[ken was here]
[was he?]

asmith

this should do it,

\[.*?\]

eddyc

Wow thanks for the replies! I was able to get it sorted , cheers