RE: [PHP] Backslashing the [ and ] in a regex

Sam Masiello <mailto:smasiello@mxlogic.com> on Wednesday, February 04, 2004 1:36 PM said: > Thank you for the reply, Adam, but unfortunately it didn't work. So you want to accept input that may or may not look like the following? Here is some \[text\] for j00. Well I'm no regex expert but I *think* you need to do \\\[ and \\\]. [ is a special character in regex so it must be escaped (oh btw, it's called escaping and not backlashing...) like so: \[. but that's only if you want to grab a single [ by itself. if you're looking for a \ you'll also need to escape this since it too is a special character. so you'd do \\. but in your case you just happen to have everything next to each other and i think that may be what's confusing you. \\ will match \ \[ will match [ \\\[ will match \[ (keep in mind that \\ and \[ don't need to be next to each other to match \[ if they are contained within one of those regex OR lists... [...]) i used the regex coach (something i highly recommend you get) to "figure" this out (assuming i'm right at all). hope this helps! chris. p.s. the following regex: [\w\s\\\[\]\.]* will match: Here is some text \[for\] j00. keep in mind this may or may not be what you want...