i've got an expression :) just needs...correcting

[GoneNowBye]

i'm at school now on my phone btw, so if its obvouse its because my mind is focused on the pending stats exam

 

heres the problem

 

i need a REGEX expression which matches "[this] but not \[this]"

my expression : /[^\\]\[[(a-z)]*\]/  its fine, but it wont match correctly if a valid tag ([tag]) is at the start of the string

"[hello] \[world]" no matches

" [hello] \[world]" matches [hello]

please help

[GoneNowBye]

i've now got

 

/([^\\])\[[a-z]*\]/

 

which works, but its returning a multidimension array, i just want the overall matches

 

any thoughts please?

[GoneNowBye]

/(?:[^\\]|^)\[[a-z]*\]/

 

works!!!

 

but it returns a multidmensional array, i want the [1] one...can i get rid of the first (memory is a concern serously)

 

 

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => [hello]
            [1] =>  [test]
        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [0] => [hello]
            [1] => [test]
        )

)

 

 

the first one has a trailing space

[Psycho]

The issue has nothing to do with your expression. It has to do with how the PHP function returns matches. I assume you are using preg_match_all(): http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match-all.php

 

Please read the documentation on how values are populated into the $matches parameter and the available flags to modify the returned values. The default is to

  Quote

Orders results so that $matches[0] is an array of full pattern matches, $matches[1] is an array of strings matched by the first parenthesized subpattern, and so on

 

I don't believe you can get what you are after, but you can try experimenting with the other flags.

[GoneNowBye]

thanks very muchly