Regex for brackets matching

Question

I a using the current regex /(?:^|[^\/\\])\[([\w\s-]*)($|\[)/ to match when user starts to enter chars and enter [some tex, to match this. When he closes it stops the match.

The problem is that i added condition in front, the ?: and if he enter \[ or /[ , i am not going to match it.

Well but, if he has something like [text][bla - in this i will match the previous ] bracket and the string will be ][bla , but i don't want this. If he enters [test] [car - this will match the space in front and will be _[car - _ is space.

I want from both to match only from opening bracket to, not before it. Do you guys have some ideas. Thank you!

Answer 1

I am not totally clear, but if I understand you correctly, you would like to detect pairs of [ and ] angle brackets, but skip over / and \ escaped angle brackets like \] and /] , correct?

So [aaa] would be one pair, [bbb/[ccc/]ddd] another, and [eee\[fff\]ggg] another.

Here is how you can parse that with three regular expressions:

 var str = 'Test [1st], and [2nd\\[with\\]escapes], and [3nd/[more/]escapes][4thNoSpace] text'; var re = /(\[[^\]]*\])/g; var result = str.replace(/([\\\/])\]/g, '$1\x01') // replace escapes with tokens.replace(re, function(m, p1) { // process bracket pairs return '<b>' + p1 + '</b>'; }).replace(/(.)\x01/g, '$1\]'); // restore escapes from tokens console.log('before: ' + str); console.log('result: ' + result); document.body.insertAdjacentHTML('beforeend', result);

So, this input:
Test [1st], and [2nd\[with\]escapes], and [3nd/[more/]escapes][4thNoSpace] text

...produces this output:
Test <b>[1st]</b>, and <b>[2nd\[with\]escapes]</b>, and <b>[3nd/[more/]escapes]</b><b>[4thNoSpace]</b> text

Explanation:

• the test input string has 4 angle brackets pairs, two of which have escaped brackets, one follows another without a space
• the first regex replaces escaped angle brackets with with a temporary token, so that the second regex does not trip over escaped angle brackets
• the second regex identifies proper angle bracket pairs
• the third regex restored the tokens back to the escaped angle brackets
• the resulting text adds bold tags around the angle bracket pairs to indicate proper parsing

In the future it would be helpful to specify example input strings, and expected output for each input.