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Greedy vs Lazy Quantifiers in Regex

By default a quantifier takes the longest match it can; adding ? makes it take the shortest. The classic failure is <.*> swallowing an entire line of HTML when <.*?> was meant, and it is invisible until the input contains two matches on one line.

jeremy Video

Perl Regular Expression Quantifiers: Greedy, Lazy, and Possessive Matching Behavior

Regular expression quantifiers define a formal mechanism for specifying repetition constraints on atomic units (characters) or sub-expressions within pattern matching algorithms, governed by four dis…