Using regex with special characters to find a match in python

Question

I am extracting a string and need to check whether it follows a particular pattern

<![any word]>

if so I need to replace it with "". I am trying the following code

string1 = "<![if support]> hello"
string = re.sub(re.compile("<![.*?]>"),"",string1)
print(string)

But I am getting the output as

<![if support]> hello 

I wish to get the output as hello. What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

[ and ] are treated as meta characters in regex. You'll need to escape them:

In [1]: re.sub(re.compile("<!\[.*?\]>"), "", "<![if support]> hello")
Out[1]: ' hello'

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As a simplification (courtesy Wiktor Stribiżew), you can escape just the first left paren, shortening your regex to "<!\[.*?]>".