From: Justin Collins <collinsj@...>
Date: 2006-08-04T08:00:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Non-greediness in a regex - need some help verifying syn

On Aug 3, 2006, at 6:09 PM, Wes Gamble wrote:

> I realized I made an error when I did the original post.
>
> Now my problem is that it won't find any of these occurrences now.
>
> So @bigstring.scan(/~\^LNK:[\t\r\n]+?\^~/m) isn't returning anything.
> My guess is because there are no occurrences of a tab, newline, or line
> feed character _immediately_ after ~^LNK.
>
> If I do /~\^LNK:.*?[\t\r\n]+?.*?\^~/m - that should pick up what I want,
> correct?
>
> Wes
>
> --Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Morton Goldberg wrote:
> I'm not exactly an expert on regexs, to say the least, but I think .*? 
> always matches an empty string and is therefore useless. I would try 
> something like
>
> @bigstring.scan(/~\^LNK:[^\t\r\n]*[\t\r\n]+?[^\t\r\n]*\^~/m)
>
> I have not test this.
>
> Regards, Morton

No, that's not true. .*? It will match whatever it needs to get to the 
next item:

irb(main):001:0> "asidjoaisdj".match(/.*?j/)[0]
=> "asidj"
irb(main):002:0> "asidjoaisdj".match(/.*?d/)[0]
=> "asid"
irb(main):003:0> "asidjoaisdj".match(/.*?sdj/)[0]
=> "asidjoaisdj"

Therefore, it should work as Wes expects.

-Justin