Hello all thanks for taking a look at my question.
I am in need of a regular expression that will parse out elements from a string.
The string format looks something like this: "[a][b][c][something else][etc..]".
I would like to be able to parse out everything within the brackets
(a,b,c,something else, etc..).  I believe regex is capable of doing
such a task but I am not that familiar with it so I am turning to my
fellow googlers for some help.  Thanks.

Hi, 

The function you are looking for is preg_match_all()
See this page for details:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match-all.php
Also, the general PCRE page:
http://php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php

Here is a little example that deals with the string formatting you mentioned:
<?php
$string = "[a][bc][def][ghij][klmno]";

$regex = "/\[([^\]]+)/";

preg_match_all($regex,$string,$res);

foreach ($res[1] as $match) {
	echo "Found: $match\n";
}

$commastring = join(",",$res[1]);

echo "Result: $commastring";

?>

$res is an array of the elements matched between the ()'s in the
regular expression. The first element (0) is the whole input string.
The second element (1) will contain the content of the first set of
brackets as an array of matches from within the input. So by looping
through $res[1] with 'foreach' we can deal with each match from the
input.

Or, to recombine then as a comma-delimited string we use 'join' to put
all the elements of the array together with a comma between them.

I hope this helps. 

Let me know if it is still unclear.

Excellent answer!

You want to use this function?
http://cn2.php.net/preg_match

you can try it:
http://www.naturer.net/answers/as.php?userstr=[d][e][fdads][fef][r5353][r3ad]
or
http://www.naturer.net/answers/as.php?userstr=[a][b][c][something else][etc..]

Thank you amazeworld.  The links you provided certainly do the trick
but the accepted answer provided the source code which was needed. 
Thanks again for your time I do appreciate it.  Best Regards.