Matching substrings between square brackets using regular expressions

Question

Hello,
I am new at Java and have a problem with regular expressions. Let me describe the issue in 3 steps:
1.- I have an english sentence. Some words of the sentence stand between square brackets, for example "I [eat] and [sleep]"
2- I would like to match strings that are in square brackets using regular expressions (java.util.regex.*;) and here is the code I have written for the task
+Pattern findStringinSquareBrackets = Pattern.compile("\\[.*\\]");+
+     Matcher matcherOfWordInSquareBrackets = findStringinSquareBrackets.matcher("I [eat] and [sleep]");+
+//Iteration in the string+
+          while ( matcherOfWordInSquareBrackets.find() )+
+{+
+          System.out.println("Patter found! :"+ outputField.getText().substring(matcherOfWordInSquareBrackets.start(), matcherOfWordInSquareBrackets.end())+"");     +
+          }+
3- the result I have after running the code described in 2 is the following: *Patter found!: [eat] and [sleep]*
That is to say that not only words between square brackets are found but also the substring "and". And this is not what I want.
What I would like to have as a result is:
*Patter found!: [eat]*
*Patter found!: [sleep]*
That is to say I want to match only the words between the square brackets and nothing else.
Does somebody know how to do this? Any help would be great.
Best regards,
Abou

Answer 1

You can find the words by looping through the sentence and then return the substring within the indexes.
int start=0;
int end=0;
for(int i=0; i<string.length(); i++)
   if(string.substring(i,i+1).equals("[");
  start=i;
if(start!=0)
if(string.substring(i,i+1).equlas("]");
end=i;
return string.substring(start,end+1);
}something like that. This code will only find the firt word however. I do not know much about regex so I cannot help anymore.
Edited by: elasolova on Jun 16, 2009 6:45 AM
Edited by: elasolova on Jun 16, 2009 6:46 AM