Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 09/19/05 00:47

NickName (dadada@rock.com) writes:
> This is not SQL Server database problem, however, net search has failed
> to generate a solution to the problem, I'm trying my luck at this NG
> now.
>
> Problem, remove the special character, [ from text.
> e.g. text =
> "this is [1] and [stuff] and some [2] and hat [3] and dog"
>
> Desired result =
> "this is 1 and [stuff] and some 2 and hat 3 and dog"
>
> I know [[:digit:]] would find all the instances of digits inside
> brackets such as [1], [2], [3]. However, I don't know how to get rid
> of the special characters of [ and ].
>
> Any regular expression expert out there?

Since you did not specify which regular expressions you are using, I'm
taking the liberty to answer with the regexps I know, that is those of
Perl. In Perl you would say:

s/\[([0-9]+)\]/\1/g

The \[ means [, that is \ is an escape charactter. () is for grouping,
and \1 refers back to this paren.

I have only seen glimpses of the regexps in .Net, but it appears to be
similar to Perl. There might be different rules for when you need \
though. In Textpad that I use, I would have to say \( and \)to use parens
for grouping.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/productdoc/2000/books.asp

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