sednon-greedy

sed to match first pattern among multiple matches

So for a given text like

a[test] asdfasdf [sdfsdf]b

I want the first match of text which is inside the first square brackets (regex = [.*]), so in this case [test].

I tried the following command it didn't work:

echo "a[test] asdfasdf [sdfsdf]b" | sed -n -e 's/.*\(\[.*\]\).*/\1/p'

This is returning [sdfsdf]

How do I get [test] instead ?

Solution

  • .* will select the longest match. Use [^[]* and [^]]* instead.

    sed -n -e 's/[^[]*\(\[[^]]*\]\).*/\1/p'