get a string from text with regular expression

Question

How can I get only the text inside Material[amhere] ?

For example, from...

PROD_RULE0001:WARNING: Metric[amhere] exceeded the UPPER WARNING limit[80.0]

... I want only the amhere .

I tried:

var strg = "WARNING: Material[amhere] exceeded the UPPER WARNING limit[80.0]";
var testRE = strg.match("Material\[(.*)\]");
alert(testRE[1]);

Answer 1

strg.match(/Material\[(.*?)\]/);

The ? after the * makes it lazy, so the . does not capture everything afterwards.

Answer 2

another way maybe you want to use;

var material="Material[";
var str="WARNING: Material[amhere] exceeded the UPPER WARNING limit[80.0]";
var n=str.indexOf(material);
var amhere=str.substring(n+material.length, str.length).split("]")[0];

Answer 3

Your .* expression is greedy and therefore eats its way into the closing ] rather than matching up to it.

In addition to @Telémako's solution, another way is to make the expression more strict by saying "match anything except ] . This will also solve the problem.

strg.match(/Material\[([^\]*)\]]/);