Regex: To pull out a sub-string between two tags in a string

Question

I have a file in the following format:

Data Data
Data
[Start]
Data I want
[End]
Data

I\'d like to grab the Data I want from between the

Answer 1

A more complete discussion of the pitfalls of using a regex to find matching tags can be found at: http://faq.perl.org/perlfaq4.html#How_do_I_find_matchi. In particular, be aware that nesting tags really need a full-fledged parser in order to be interpreted correctly.

Note that case sensitivity will need to be turned off in order to answer the question as stated. In perl, that's the i modifier:

$ echo "Data Data Data [Start] Data i want [End] Data" \
  | perl -ne '/\[start\](.*?)\[end\]/i; print "$1\n"'
 Data i want 

The other trick is to use the *? quantifier which turns off the greediness of the captured match. For instance, if you have a non-matching [end] tag:

Data Data [Start] Data i want [End] Data [end]

you probably don't want to capture:

 Data i want [End] Data