Have a look at this fiddle /

Here I want to split the characters which starts with [* or [*# and ends with *]. The current regular expression split the string which starts with [*# but not [*. I have tried the following patterns,

/(\[\*\#*[a-zA-Z0-9]+\*\])/g

/(\[\*\#{0,1}[a-zA-Z0-9]+\*\])/g

Thanks in advance.

Have a look at this fiddle http://jsfiddle/yeXWv/

Here I want to split the characters which starts with [* or [*# and ends with *]. The current regular expression split the string which starts with [*# but not [*. I have tried the following patterns,

/(\[\*\#*[a-zA-Z0-9]+\*\])/g

/(\[\*\#{0,1}[a-zA-Z0-9]+\*\])/g

Thanks in advance.

• javascript
• jquery
• regex

2 Answers 2

Try making the hash character optional:

/(\[\*\#?[a-zA-Z0-9 ]+\*\])/g

Edit: added missing white space :-)

You forgot to allow for spaces, which was the real problem -- not the missing # character.

/(\[\*\#?[a-zA-Z0-9 ]+\*\])/g

That will preserve the [*...*] strings in the output array. To omit them, remove the parentheses:

/\[\*\#?[a-zA-Z0-9 ]+\*\]/g

http://jsfiddle/mblase75/zU576/