PHP REGEX delete brackets and text in brackets

Question

Need to delete brackets and text in it. For now, it almsot working. Deletes all text starting from bracket. My code:

$lines = preg_replace("/\(([^\d]+)/", '',  $lines);

For example, text:

Some random words (word1 / word2 / word3) aaaa

Code deletes all text after brackets too,

Some random words

but what I need to do is (what it should look like):

Some random words aaaa

Answer 1

/\([^()]*\)/

• \( - opening bracket
• [^()]* - as many characters as possible, which are not brackets
• \) - closing bracket

You can optionally remove one space at the end (/\([^()]*\) ?/) so that you wont have two spaces where the removal happened.

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Note that this wont handle cases of nested brackets like:

foo (bar (baz) quiz)

To do that, you will have to be a little more creative:

(?<no_brackets>[^()]*){0}(?<balanced_brackets>\(\g<no_brackets>\)|\(\g<no_brackets>\g<balanced_brackets>\g<no_brackets>\))

See it in action

Answer 2

You are missing an extra \) at the end of your expression. As is, your expression will start matching the moment it finds an open bracket and keep on going.