without knowing the format of the input data or what flags you’re using it’s obviously a bit harder to reason about, but since you’re doing a replace i assume you don’t care about the content of the bracketed text, you just want to remove it. the way i’m reading yours is
(?:# don't store this group# either
^ # start of line
-\[[^[]+\]# a -, a [ followed by at least one non-[, then a ] (passing one is fine)$# end of line |# or
? # maybe one space
\[.+?\]# a [ followed by at least one character, then a ] (don't pass any)
? # maybe one space)
since the two branches are almost identical, you can probably compact it into -?\s*\[.+?\]\s*. maybe a dash, then maybe some space, then angle brackets around something, then maybe more space.
aaah i see. then a conditional makes sense if you need to one-shot it. personally i would have run it through twice but i know there are systems that don’t allow that.
It may feel like it, but I needed to handle all the edge cases. But if you think it can be simplified, I’m willing to learn.
without knowing the format of the input data or what flags you’re using it’s obviously a bit harder to reason about, but since you’re doing a replace i assume you don’t care about the content of the bracketed text, you just want to remove it. the way i’m reading yours is
(?: # don't store this group # either ^ # start of line -\[[^[]+\] # a -, a [ followed by at least one non-[, then a ] (passing one is fine) $ # end of line | # or ? # maybe one space \[.+?\] # a [ followed by at least one character, then a ] (don't pass any) ? # maybe one space )since the two branches are almost identical, you can probably compact it into
-?\s*\[.+?\]\s*. maybe a dash, then maybe some space, then angle brackets around something, then maybe more space.You are right. It is just removal of the bracketed text. The input is multi-line string, so only flag used was the multi-line mode.
These are string lines I have encountered and how I wanted to change them:
1. "[...]" -> "" 2. "-[...]" -> "" 3. "-[...] text" -> "-text" 4. "-text [...]" -> "-text" 5. "[...] text [...]" -> "text" 6. "-[...] text [...]" -> "-text"The main point is that I needed to remove the dash only if there is no other text on the line.
I have tried the regex you are suggesting at the beginning, but it failed at points (3) and (6).
EDIT: It just occurred to me that the first line of my comment sounds like stupid AI. 🤦
aaah i see. then a conditional makes sense if you need to one-shot it. personally i would have run it through twice but i know there are systems that don’t allow that.