It doesn't seem like the regex pattern was right

Question

I need to check a string for a specific string, I want to use a regular expression for this, but the more I try, the more it bothers me (and upsets); I don't seem to understand.

I need the expression to return true when the string contains something like this: [[module:instance]] , but it must satisfy the following conditions:

• Always open with two brackets [[
• After two brackets, a string can contain everything except : and has no length restrictions for it
• After character 1 : must be a character
• After : again a line that can contain everything except : and has no length limit
• Always close with 2 brackets ]]

Any help, advice, good tutorials, something would be very helpful!

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Try the following:

 preg_match('/\[\[[^:]+?:[^:]+?]]/', $str, $match) 

Explanation:

• \[\[ matches literal [[
• [^:]+? matches any except : (not greedy)
• : matches literal :
• [^:]+? matches any except : (not greedy)
• ]] matches the literal ]] .

Answer 2

 \[\[[^:]+:[^:]+\]\] 

Explanation:

\[\[ matches two opening brackets.

[^:] matches any single character except for the colon.

[^:]+ matches one or more characters except colons.

Answer 3

Try this for your regex:

 \[\[.*?:[^:]*?\]\] 

Backslashes are required before square brackets because they are metacharacters such as., *, And ?.

Answer 4

What about \[\[[^:]+\:[^:]+\]\] ? It works?

It must match two literal characters [ , then any character that is not : repeats at least once, then a : and then any character that is not : at least once, then two literals ] .

Answer 5

Will this work?

[[[^]: {1} [^:]]]