Questions and answers

Are regular expressions greedy?

Are regular expressions greedy?

The standard quantifiers in regular expressions are greedy, meaning they match as much as they can, only giving back as necessary to match the remainder of the regex. By using a lazy quantifier, the expression tries the minimal match first.

What is non greedy?

A non-greedy match means that the regex engine matches as few characters as possible—so that it still can match the pattern in the given string. In other words, the non-greedy quantifiers give you the shortest possible match from a given position in the string.

What is a word for not greedy?

altruistic, apathetic, benevolent, full, generous, indifferent, munificent, self-restrained, unselfish.

What is non greedy search?

About Non-Greedy Search The Non-Greedy search makes it possible to identify the target element from a pool of similar applications, matching the attributes you specify. It needs to be included in the top-level tag of a selector. If a generated selector contains the idx attribute, its value is set by default to * .

What’s the opposite of not greedy?

Snarky answer: the opposite of “greedy” is “lazy”: rexegg.com/regex-quantifiers.html :D.

How are regular definitions different from regular expressions?

That is, a regular language, in general, corresponds to more than one regular expressions. For example ( a + b )* and ( a*b* )* correspond to the set of all strings over the alphabet {a, b}. Regular expressions are equal if and only if they correspond to the same language.

What’s the difference between greedy and non greedy regular expressions?

Regular Expressions – Greedy vs non-greedy. By default, regular expression matching is greedy, which means they try to match as many matches as possible in a given string.

How can I write a regex which matches non greedy?

I test on http://regexpal.com This expression matches all text from . I need it to match with the first encountered > after the initial

What does greedy mean in a regex quantifier?

By default, a quantifier tells the engine to match as many instances of its quantified token or subpattern as possible. This behavior is called greedy. For instance, take the + quantifier. It allows the engine to match one or more of the token it quantifies: \\d+ can therefore match one or more digits.

What does lazy mean in the context of regex?

Laziness: Lazy quantifier first repeats the token as few times as required, and gradually expands the match as the engine backtracks through the regex to find an overall match. The standard quantifiers in regular expressions are greedy, meaning they match as much as they can, only giving back as necessary to match the remainder of the regex.