“简单”正则表达式不起作用我想要它？

What I'm trying to do is get the text and url out of a string like this:

This is a title [http://awebsite.com/a/download.zip]

This is the regex I am using:

/(.*?)[(.*?)]/

I know what the problem is... the first (.*?) is matching the whole string! But I'm not sure how to only get it to match upto the first [ occurance.

An explanation of what I'm doing wrong and how to fix would be good thank you. I WILL eventually learn regex!

Thanks guys

PS: using php and the preg_match function.

[(.*?)] is a character class and matches one of: '(', '.', '*', '?' or ')'.

You need to escape the [ causing it to match a literal '[' (and the ] is not special, so it doesn't need escaping).

/(.*?)\[(.*?)]/

See: http://www.regular-expressions.info/charclass.html

You've almost got it, but try escaping the grouping characters [ and ], so you'll get:

/(.*?)\[(.*?)\]/

Your problem is not the first part rather the second part.

You have to escape the [ like this :

/(.*?)\[(.*?)]/

Explanation :

    "
(       # Match the regular expression below and capture its match into backreference number 1
   .       # Match any single character
      *?      # Between zero and unlimited times, as few times as possible, expanding as needed (lazy)
)
\[      # Match the character “[” literally
(       # Match the regular expression below and capture its match into backreference number 2
   .       # Match any single character
      *?      # Between zero and unlimited times, as few times as possible, expanding as needed (lazy)
)
]       # Match the character “]” literally
"

You need to escape to [] characters:

/(.*?)\[(.*?)\]/