Regular Expression Syntax Problem

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hammerman

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Jan 16, 2004
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okay.. I'm not the best at writing reg exp so I'm sure this is simple but I've tried it a hundred different ways... Given a string I want to pull out the first occurance of all characters,digits,spaces and special chars between the [ and ]
for instance I usally have a string such as "[blah boo & foo] + [heeee]" I want to return "[blah boo & foo]" below is my feable attempt to get this...

Dim r As Regex = New Regex("\[.*\]")
Dim m As Match = r.Match(stringGoesHere)
Dim basdf As String = m.Value

"\[.*\]" is somewhat sucessful.. but it returns the whole string (obviously because the string starts and ends with [ ]. So I try something like \[\w*\s*\] and that only works for something like [booo] no [boo foo]. I guess I'm stuck in the middle portion where I want everything between the [].. any help is much appreciated...
 
Try
Code: 
Pattern = "((?<=\[)[^\[\]]*)"
The (?<=\[) skips until it finds a [ ( \[ )
The [^\[\]] picks up characters after the [ that is not a [ or ].
( \[ , \] )

Also, you can make your own little app that will test your RegEx expressions... you only need two TextBoxes and a Button :).
 
Works like a charm!

thanks - that works like a charm!!! One thing I love about reg exp is how elegant it is to write a complicated match pattern.. just wish I was better at doing them :D
 
Iceplug said:
Also, you can make your own little app that will test your RegEx expressions... you only need two TextBoxes and a Button :).
Click to expand...


Iceplug ... you have any code for this test app? I think it would be a good way for me to learn regular expressions. Thanks...
 
I think IcePlug was simply suggesting that you create a project with a form that contains something like a few textboxes and button. Enter text to be searched into TextBox1, enter a search pattern in TextBox2, and when the user clicks the button, output the results in TextBox3.
 
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