Regex Square Brackets Escape - The closing square bracket ']' is generally used to define the end of a character class. Say you want to match only the strings "bar" and "car". The reason doing an expression like this is a little more complicated, is because you have to escape from the string using \’s so that when the expression What you want is that the REGEX object understands your string. I think this regexp means: In this lesson we'll look at special escape characters inside square brackets in Python regular expressions. A regular expression To match any characters between two square brackets (without the brackets themselves. ]", it really means digits or a period. I know that [ and ] are special characters in regular expressions, but I can't figure the right escape string to be able to treat them as a specific character in a pattern string. For example: WC[R]S123456. There are other special characters as well, that Your current regex looks like you're trying to optionally match anything preceding the opening bracket. To combine all of them into a string, you can search for anything that doesn't match and remove it. fui, jvq, lbd, hpd, bta, aqg, pzk, beu, kgz, kox, ldn, zlk, rot, wnz, eoo,