Regex brackets and brackets next to eachother

Question

I'm a regex novice and I cannot figure out how to match the following:

String example:

"This is my string [something: something] and the string is very pretty [something: something][a][b][c]."

At the moment I got a regex that matches all start and end square brackets. \[([^]]*)\].

This yields the following

• [something: something]
• [something: something]
• [a]
• [b]
• [c]

I want to group standalone brackets and brackets which has brackets next to it.

The regex should group it like;

• [something: something]
• [something: something][a][b][c]

Anyone able to help?

Answer 1

You can do:

((?:\[[^]]*\])+)

• The non-captured group (?:\[[^]]*\]) matches [, then any number of characters upto ] and then ]

• The captured group ((?:\[[^]]*\])+) matches one or more occurrence of the non-captured group

Demo