I've seen several examples of people using brackets to define what look like regexp character classes. In my limited testing I don't think they are genuine character classes but they seem to be similar.
My task was to use sscanf() to parse an array of strings with the format:
number SPACE string_which_may_also_have_spaces
The normal %s conversion command treats spaces as some kind of delimiter. So, you can get the strings if you know beforehand how many "words" there will be. But, my input was variable.
Here's what I came up with: (note use of the dollar-sign 'end of string' hidden delimiter)
sscanf($string_to_parse,'%d %[^$]s',$num,$text);
This conversion command says "look for an integer, then a space, then any string up to the end of the string"
