From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2002-02-13T21:01:17+09:00
Subject: Re: simple XML parsing (greedy / non-greedy

Hi --

On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Ron Jeffries wrote:

> Suppose I had this text
>
> 	'<a>this is a</a><a>this is a also</a>'
>
> and I wanted to write a regexp that would match the tag <a>..</a> and
> return
>
> 	'this is a'
> 	(not 'this is a</a><a>this is a also')
>
> I'd sort of like to use a pattern like
>
> Regexp.new( '<a>(.*)</a>' ), but this is greedy and matches as far as it
> can.
>
> Is there a way to tell the match operator to stop on the earliest match?

Yes -- just use *? instead of *


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav