带方括号的正则表达式

Question

I need to remove substring of a string bounded by the square brackets [ and ] . This thread here shows how to do that with an example of <...> .

My example:

import re

s = "something something [1] another thing"
re.sub('[[^]]+]', '', s)

This is the output:

<input>:1: FutureWarning: Possible nested set at position 1
'something something [1] another thing'

The expected output is something something another thing .

How to regex in similar code dealing with square brackets?

Answer 1

Escape the literal brackets:

re.sub(r'\[[^\]]+\]', '', s)

This uses a raw string as without it the backslashes themselves would need to be escaped:

re.sub('\\[[^\\]]+\\]', '', s)