Regex match outer nested tags

Question

I have this string

blabla [IC=\"test\"]Hello, [IC=\"testing\"] this is a nested tag [EC], cya.[EC] blabla

I\'m trying to match the outer [

Answer 1

I dont get your decision to use the \s\S and it just seems more confusing than it really should be. However to fix the issue you are having simply remove the ?

...([\s\S]*?)\[EC]...

to

...([\s\S]*)\[EC]...

resulting into

\[IC=\"([\s\S]*?)\"]([\s\S]*)\[EC]\n{0,1}

however i would simply use \w and .* because they are easier

\[IC="(\w*)"\](.*)\[EC\]

EDIT:

Working off of the assumption that you actually need to get the string value from [IC=".."] and string inbetween. otherwise if you just need whole data then no need for the groupings

\[IC="\w*"\].*\[EC\]