Regular Expression Total Matches on Instances

Question

My test string contains 4 instances of an open square bracket and a closed square bracket, so I would like the following regular expression to return 4 matches, but it only returns 1.

const test = "sf[[[[asdf]]]]asdf"
const regExp = new RegExp(/^.*\[.*\].*$/, "g");
const matches = test.match(regExp).length;

console.log(matches);

Answer 1

You can use a combination of recursion and regular expressions:

function parse(str) {
  const matches = [];

  str.replace(/\[(.*)]/, (match, capture) => {
    matches.push(match, ...parse(capture));
  });

  return matches;
}

console.log(parse('sf[[[[asdf]]]]asdf'));
console.log(parse('st[[as[[asdf]]]a]sdf'));