c# regex extracting substrings from a string

Question

I need to get all substrings that are placed between 2 signs.

For example substrings placed between ] and [:

abcabc]substrings[kkkkkkk]iwant[12345]tohave[!@#$%]

and I get: substrings iwant tohave

I tried (?<=\])(.*)(?=\[) but it returns substrings[kkkkkkk]iwant[12345]tohave.

Answer 1

Your regex would need to be (?<=\])(.*?)(?=\[).

Note the added ? sign to match as few as possible.

Then you have to combine the (at the moment) three matches with spaces and you will get the output you want!

Answer 2

Make it non greedy .*? or else it would match until the last [

You don't need the capturing group if you want to get the matches only:

(?<=\]).*?(?=\[)

Test