How to get string value in brackets with regex

Question

I have already seen another page that asks the same question however the answer given on that page does not seem to work for me.

I have a text file that contains a lot of words in square brackets and I am trying to remove the brackets. I have opened the text file and converted it to a string using the StreamReader class.

When I try to display the strings,none show up.

Can anybody tell me what i'm doing wrong here? Heres the code:

List<string> words = new List<string>();
            StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(File.OpenRead(ofd.FileName));
            string wordlist = sr.ReadToEnd();
            textEntry.Text = wordlist;
            MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(wordlist, "[(.+?)]", RegexOptions.Singleline);
            foreach (Match match in matches)
            {
                string add = match.Groups[1].Value;
                words.Add(add);
            }

            foreach (string word in words)
            {
                MessageBox.Show(word);
            }

Any help is appreciated,thanks.

Answer 1

You have to escape the brackets, since they are preserved keywords in regular expressions. You see in the code below the \\ is escaped too, since \\ has a special meaning in C#, so escape the escape character:

Regex.Matches(wordlist, "\\[(.+?)\\]", RegexOptions.Singleline);

Or, using the verbatim operator:

Regex.Matches(wordlist, @"\[(.+?)\]", RegexOptions.Singleline);