Regex to split BBCode into pieces

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Please don’t use BBCode. It’s evil.

BBCode came to life when developers
were too lazy to parse HTML correctly
and decided to invent their own markup
language. As with all products of
laziness, the result is completely
inconsistent, unstandardized, and
widely adopted.

Try to use a user-friendlier markup language, like Markdown (that’s what Stack Overflow uses) or Textile.
Both of them have parsers for Ruby:

If you still don’t want to heed to my advice and choose to go with BBCode, don’t reinvent the wheel and use a BBCode parser. To answer your question directly, there is the least desirable option: use regex.

/\[img\].*?\[\/img\]/

As seen on rubular. Although I would use /\[img\](.*?)\[\/img\]/, so it will extract the contents inside the img tags. Note that this is fairly fragile and will break if there are nested img tags. Hence, the advice to use a parser.

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