Hi Perl Monks, Hi Perl Monks,

A program I am working on is parsing text to extract anything enclosed in curly or straight brackets. However it should not extract {} or [] (empty enclosures)

For instance if the input line is: 

EntityMappingFetchByName?[](EntityName$ = DERIVED_ATTRIBUTE_TABLE, Fie
+ldNames$[] = [ USER_ENTITY_NAME ], text${} = { this is a test }), lin
+e 6

[download]
should return "[ USER_ENTITY_NAME ]" and "{ this is a test }" only. When I use this pattern: 


((\{.+?\})|(\[.+?\])) in a while loop

[download]

I get: 

MATCH = [](EntityName$ = DERIVED_ATTRIBUTE_TABLE, FieldNames$[]
MATCH = [ USER_ENTITY_NAME ]
MATCH = {} = { this is a test }

[download]

Whatever I try, the expression always seems to be greedy. How do I make the expression not greedy and skipping empty {} and []?

Thanks for your answers

In reply to Regular expressions: Extracting certain text from a line by Wcool

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
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