Regular expression to extract text between either square or curly brackets

5
votes

Related to my previous question, I have a string on the following format:

this {is} a [sample] string with [some] {special} words. [another one]

What is the regular expression to extract the words within either square or curly brackets, ie.

{is}
[sample]
[some]
{special}
[another one]

Note: In my use case, brackets cannot be nested. I would also like to keep the enclosing characters, so that I can tell the difference between them when processing the results.

2
regex
What if the string is blah [{] blah {]}? – kennytm

2 Answers

7
votes

Simply or (|) the different things you wish to match together:

\[.*?\]|\{.*?\}

2
votes

This one seems to work:

[[{].*?[}\]]

Or this one:

\[.*?\]|{.*?}

If you want to catch the cases mentioned in the comments below.

You can use an online regex tester to try these things out. I think http://gskinner.com/RegExr/ is one of the more user-friendly options.