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Regular expression - Greedy and Reluctant quantifiers

 
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Using the following example code:



And the following test cases:







Why is the third test not consuming any characters? I was expecting the 1st and 3rd to produce the same output.



 
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Right, the third one is extremely reluctant ;-)

Based on Greedy vs. Reluctant vs. Possessive Quantifiers, I see -



versus


Regards,
Dan
 
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The output doesn't show any characters, because the pattern ".*?" essentially says: "combine as few characters as possible to get zero or more occurrences of any character".

That's exactly what the empty String is.
 
O. Ziggy
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Stephan van Hulst wrote:The output doesn't show any characters, because the pattern ".*?" essentially says: "combine as few characters as possible to get zero or more occurrences of any character".

That's exactly what the empty String is.



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