Regex not stopping at first space

Question

Trying to create a pattern that matches an opening bracket and gets everything between it and the next space it encounters. I thought \[.*\s would achieve that, but it gets everything from the first opening bracket on. How can I tell it to break at the next space?

Answer 1

\[[^\s]*\s

The .* is a greedy, and will eat everything, including spaces, until the last whitespace character. If you replace it with \S* or [^\s]*, it will match only a chunk of zero or more characters other than whitespace.

Masking the opening bracket might be needed. If you negate the \s with ^\s, the expression should eat everything except spaces, and then a space, which means up to the first space.

Answer 2

You could use a reluctant qualifier:

[.*?\s

Or instead match on all non-space characters:

[\S*\s

Answer 3

Use this:

\[[^ ]*

This matches the opening bracket (\[) and then everything except space ([^ ]) zero or more times (*).