So I have a complicated question that will require an advanced regular expression, which I am trying to write in PHP. I don't have a code snippet, because I really have no idea where to start with this regular expression.
I need to remove some parts of a string, ONLY if that string ends with something like [ABC].
If it starts with [ABC] or if [ABC] is somewhere in the middle, that's fine.
All I need to do is remove the [ABC] if it's at the end of the string. Problem is: the ABC can be any letter/number combination of up to 5 characters.
Some examples:
Hello [ABC] should become Hello
[ABC] Hello should stay [ABC] Hello
[A] Hi [B] should become [A] Hi
[X] Hello [Y] World [Z] should become [X] Hello [Y] World
I managed to remove all content in square brackets (including the brackets), but I have no clue how to make it only remove content + brackets if these brackets are at the very end of the string.
$text= "[X] Hello [Y] World [Z]";
$outputs .= preg_replace('/\[.*?\]/', '', $text);
A $ anchor with a negated character class instead of lazy dot matching pattern will do the job.
\[[^][]*]$
See the regex demo. This seems a bit more generic expression than what you need. You may adjust it for your special case - the ABC can be any letter/number combination of up to 5 characters - as follows:
\[[[:alnum:]]{1,5}]$
See this regex demo.
Pattern details:
\[ - a literal [[^][]* - any 0+ chars other than ] and [[[:alnum:]]{1,5} - 1 to 5 alphanumeric chars] - a literal ]$ - end of stringSee the PHP demo:
$text= "[X] Hello [Y] World [Z]";
$outputs = preg_replace('/\[[[:alnum:]]{1,5}]$/', '', $text);
echo trim($outputs);
// => [X] Hello [Y] World