preg_replace not doing what I expect
<p>I have the following paterns in a paragraph of text and I need to replace it with nothing, so that it disappears from the paragraph.</p>

<p>The sendtence contains <code>CONSULTANTS [45416,2010-05-11]</code> I need to remove the [] and everything within these [] , not the characters within the [] could be anything</p>

<p>I tried the below but this only removes the []</p>

<pre><code>$par = preg_replace('/[\[*\]]/','',$par);
</code></pre>
