Android shell sed trouble

Question

I'm trying to use sed to remove all instances of text enclosed by square brackets from a document, so my code is:

sed -r 's|\[[^\]]*\]||g' file

However, this does not seem to pick up all instances of text enclosed by square brackets. In particular, it seems to fail with:

[/a]
[/b]
[span style "blah" blah]

and so forth, but it works with square brackets enclosing plaintext. As far as I can tell, the regex should be looking for square brackets enclosing any character that is not a ], so what exactly is wrong?

Answer 1

I tried this regex and it didn't remove any text in brackets.

When I removed that second '\\', so the regex was

 sed -r 's|\[[^]]*\]||g'

it worked perfectly in all cases.

I tried it on both Mac and Linux. Android runs Linux, so it will probably work there too.

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A word of explanation: Scansets are special where escapes are concerned. If the ']' character is the very first one in the scanset, you don't need to escape it. If it's not the very first one in the scanset, you can't escape it.