Hi,

I am trying to create a regex that will match a sentence between two specific strings.
below is the sentence to match, the part I would like to match is marked in bold.

[[Text:hi this is a nice sentence[[very nice]] I like this text]] this is not related [[not]]

I have the following regex: \[\[Text:.*?]]
The problem is that it stops at the ]] after "very nice" and matches only: [[Text:hi this is a nice sentence[[very nice]]

Thanks anyone for any help.

Light Interactive.

What platform are you using?  Is this part of a replacement operation or just matching?

This worked for me in PHP:

Raw Match Pattern:
(\[(?:(?>[^\[\]]+)|(?1))*\])

Note that you will need to do a second test to match only the Text: matches returned.

Note that another acceptable pattern for this nested [ ] matching would have also been:

Raw Match Pattern:
\[(?:(?>[^\[\]]+)|(?R))*\]

However the pattern above using (?1) allows for the use of lookbehinds etc.

I am usint .net, and this is part of a replacement string.

I am trying to test the patterns you suggested in Expresso (I hope you know) but I get errors.

thanks.

Here's C# .NET code:

http://pastebin.com/f350a0748

Example pattern adapted from Friedl's "Mastering Regular Expressions" page 436.