Need a regex to capture numbered citations [duplicate] - regex

Question

This question already has an answer here:
Learning Regular Expressions [closed]
(1 answer)
Closed 5 years ago.
Bit of a regex newbie... sorry. I have a document with IEEE style citations, or numbers in brackets. They can be one number, as in [23], or several, as in [5, 7, 14], or a range, as in [12-15].
What I have now is [\[|\s|-]([0-9]{1,3})[\]|,|-].
This is capturing single numbers, and the first number in a group, but not subsequent numbers or either number in a range.
Then I need to refer to that number in an expression like \1.
I hope this is clear! I have a suspicion I don't understand the OR operator.

Answer 1

How about this?
(\[\d+\]|\[\d+-\d+\]|\[\d+(,\d+)*\])
Actually this can be even more siplified to : (\[\d+-\d+\]|\[\d+(,\d+)*\])
my #test = (
"[5,7,14]",
"[23]",
"[12-15]"
);
foreach my $val (#test) {
if ($val =~ /(\[\d+-\d+\]|\[\d+(,\d+)*\])/ ) {
print "match $val!\n";
}
else {
print "no match!\n";
}
}
This prints:
match [5,7,14]!
match [23]!
match [12-15]!
Whitespaces are not taken into account but you can add them if you need to

Answer 2

I think Jim's Answer is helpful, but some generalizing and coding for better understand:
If Questions was looking for more complex but possible one like [1,3-5]:
(\[\d+(,\s?\d+|\d*-\d+)*\])
^^^^ optional space after ','
//validates:
[3,33-24,7]
[3-34]
[1,3-5]
[1]
[1, 2]
Demo for this Regex
JavaScript code for replacing digits by links:
//define input string:
var mytext = "[3,33-24,7]\n[3-34]\n[1,3-5]\n[1]\n[1, 2]" ;
//call replace of matching [..] that calls digit replacing it-self
var newtext = mytext.replace(/(\[\d+(,\s?\d+|\d*-\d+)*\])/g ,
function(ci){ //ci is matched citations `[..]`
console.log(ci);
//so replace each number in `[..]` with custom links
return ci.replace(/\d+/g,
function(digit){
return ''+digit+'' ;
});
});
console.log(newtext);
/*output:
'[3,33-24,7]
[3-34]
[1,3-5]
[1]
[1, 2]'
*/