RegEx Starts with [ and ending with ]

Question

What is the Regular Expression to find the strings starting with [ and ending with ]. Between [ and] all kind of character are fine.

Answer 1

This should work:

^\[.+\]$

^ is 'start of string'
\[ is an escaped [, because [ is a control character
.+ matches all strings of length >= 1 (. is 'any character', + means 'match previous pattern one or more times')
\] is an escaped ]
$ is 'end of string'

If you want to match [] as well, change the + to a * ('match zero or more times')

Then use the Regex class to match:

bool match = Regex.IsMatch(input, "^\[.+\]$");

or, if you're using this several times or in a loop, create a Regex instance for better performance:

private static readonly Regex s_MyRegexPatternThingy = new Regex("^\[.+\]$");

bool match = s_MyRegexPatternThingy.IsMatch(input);