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

user_65990 0
Viewed 741893

I need to extract from a string a set of characters which are included between two delimiters, without returning the delimiters themselves.

A simple example should be helpful:

Target: extract the substring between square brackets, without returning the brackets themselves.

Base string: This is a test string [more or less]

If I use the following reg. ex.

\[.*?\]

The match is [more or less]. I need to get only more or less (without the brackets).

Is it possible to do it?

regex
13 Answers

Here's a general example with obvious delimiters (X and Y):

(?<=X)(.*?)(?=Y)

Here it's used to find the string between X and Y. Rubular example here, or see image:

enter image description here

user_57837450

Most updated solution

If you are using Javascript, the best solution that I came up with is using match instead of exec method. Then, iterate matches and remove the delimiters with the result of the first group using $1

const text = "This is a test string [more or less], [more] and [less]";
const regex = /\[(.*?)\]/gi;
const resultMatchGroup = text.match(regex); // [ '[more or less]', '[more]', '[less]' ]
const desiredRes = resultMatchGroup.map(match => match.replace(regex, "$1"))
console.log("desiredRes", desiredRes); // [ 'more or less', 'more', 'less' ]

As you can see, this is useful for multiple delimiters in the text as well

user_100104040

I wanted to find a string between / and #, but # is sometimes optional. Here is the regex I use:

  (?<=\/)([^#]+)(?=#*)
user_46113040

Here is how I got without '[' and ']' in C#:

var text = "This is a test string [more or less]";

// Getting only string between '[' and ']'
Regex regex = new Regex(@"\[(.+?)\]");
var matchGroups = regex.Matches(text);

for (int i = 0; i < matchGroups.Count; i++)
{
    Console.WriteLine(matchGroups[i].Groups[1]);
}

The output is:

more or less
user_20776760
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