RegEx to get text from inside the square brackets [duplicate]

Answer 1

A single lookahead should do the trick here:

 a = "this is [test] line i [want] text [inside] square [brackets]"
 words = a.match(/[^[\]]+(?=])/g)

but in a general case, exec or replace-based loops lead to simpler code:

words = []
a.replace(/\[(.+?)\]/g, function($0, $1) { words.push($1) })

Answer 2

This fiddle uses RegExp.exec and outputs only what's inside the parenthesis.

var data = "this is [test] line i [want] text [inside] square [brackets]"
var re= /\[(.*?)\]/g;
for(m = re.exec(data); m; m = re.exec(data)){
    alert(m[1])
}