Regular expression to extract text between square brackets

Question

Simple regex question. I have a string on the following format:

this is a [sample] string with [some] special words. [another one]

What is the regular expression to extract the words within the square brackets, ie.

sample
some
another one

Note: In my use case, brackets cannot be nested.

Answer 1

You can use the following regex globally:

\[(.*?)\]

Explanation:

• \[ : [ is a meta char and needs to be escaped if you want to match it literally.
• (.*?) : match everything in a non-greedy way and capture it.
• \] : ] is a meta char and needs to be escaped if you want to match it literally.