Actually leaving out the square brackets is required! Not so much they didn't add anything as, they subtracted a lot! By now maybe the OP has read the regex docs and will realise that the square brackets denote a set of characters which matches just one character in the string being matched. It looks like the OP was thinking [] is equivalent to (). It's not.

True laziness is hard work

In reply to Re^2: REGEX Frustration by GrandFather
in thread REGEX Frustration by RobertJ

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