Regular expression to remove suffixes enclosed in square brackets from comma-delimited list

Question

I need to format the followin string

name[Name], emloyeeno[Employee Number], joindate[Date Of Join:dd MMM yyyy], email[EMail]

as

name, employeeno, joindate, email

I'm trying to use a regular expression to resolve this, I best I could come up with is

/\[.*]/g

But it is not resolving the problem, I've a sample created here.

Can you help me to resolve this issue?

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

4

You can use negated character class. Something like [aeiou] matches exactly one of the lowercase vowels. [^aeiou] matches one of anything but.

For this problem, you can try /\[[^\]]*\]/g.

There are 3 parts:

You may also try /\[.*?\]/ instead if you're lazy.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

Community

answered Oct 16 '10 at 06:43

Is there a specific reason to use /\[[^\]]*\]/g instead of /\[.*?\]/ as the first choice? Something like performance or the way in which the regular expression is resolved. – Arun P Johny Oct 16 '10 at 09:38

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 16 '10 at 06:47

1

/\[(.+?)\]/g

This will enforce 1 or more characters inside the brackets. Also use parens to extract the match.

answered Oct 16 '10 at 06:47

bob.faist

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 17 '10 at 11:03

It is because your regular expression /[.*]/g is a greedy regular expression.

You regular expression matches all the characters between the first [ and the last ].

You need to change the regular expression as /[.*?]/g

Arun P Johny · Answer 4 · 2010-10-16T13:09:38.807

0

It is because your regular expression is greedy.

You need to modify the regex as [.*?]

You need to modify it as given here

edited Oct 16 '10 at 13:09

answered Oct 16 '10 at 06:43

Arun P Johny

4 Answers4