Regex match outer nested tags

Question

I have this string

blabla [IC=\"test\"]Hello, [IC=\"testing\"] this is a nested tag [EC], cya.[EC] blabla

I\'m trying to match the outer [

Answer 1

Try this:

(\[IC="\w*"\].*\[EC\])

https://regex101.com/r/MVU9ni/1

Matches 0 or more characters that are located in between [IC="any_word_character_here"] and [EC].

Answer 2

I dont get your decision to use the \s\S and it just seems more confusing than it really should be. However to fix the issue you are having simply remove the ?

...([\s\S]*?)\[EC]...

to

...([\s\S]*)\[EC]...

resulting into

\[IC=\"([\s\S]*?)\"]([\s\S]*)\[EC]\n{0,1}

however i would simply use \w and .* because they are easier

\[IC="(\w*)"\](.*)\[EC\]

EDIT:

Working off of the assumption that you actually need to get the string value from [IC=".."] and string inbetween. otherwise if you just need whole data then no need for the groupings

\[IC="\w*"\].*\[EC\]

Answer 3

The regular expression below should do the trick:

[^\[]*(\[.*\])[^\]]*

You can try a working demo visiting this link.

Alternatively, if you don't want to rely on capturing groups, this should be enough:

(\[.*\])

A working demo of the regular expression above can be tested here.

Answer 4

You could use a recursive pattern (supported in PCRE):

\[IC[^][]*\]
(?:(?:[^][]*|(?R))*)
\[EC\]

See a demo on regex101.com.