“简单”正则表达式不起作用我想要它？

Question

What I'm trying to do is get the text and url out of a string like this:

This is a title [http://awebsite.com/a/download.zip]

This is the regex I am using:

/(.*?)[(.*?)]/

I know what the problem is... the first (.*?) is matching the whole string! But I'm not sure how to only get it to match upto the first [ occurance.

An explanation of what I'm doing wrong and how to fix would be good thank you. I WILL eventually learn regex!

Thanks guys

PS: using php and the preg_match function.

Answer 1

[(.*?)] is a character class and matches one of: '(', '.', '*', '?' or ')'.

You need to escape the [ causing it to match a literal '[' (and the ] is not special, so it doesn't need escaping).

/(.*?)\[(.*?)]/

See: http://www.regular-expressions.info/charclass.html