Not just Python, but every Regex engine works this way. You want a ? after your *, as in <--(.*?)--> if you want it to catch the first available "-->".
At this point in your adventure, you might be wondering whether regular expressions are more trouble than they are worth. They are. There are two libraries you need to take a look at, and soon: BeautifulSoup for parsing HTML, and PyParsing for parsing everything else. Take the time you were planning to spend on deciphering regexes like "(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}" and spend it learning the basics of those libraries instead -- you will not regret it. On Dec 19, 4:39 pm, vertigo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello > > Thanx for help, i have one more question: > > i noticed that while matching regexp python tries to match as wide as it's > possible, > for example: > re.sub("<!--.*-->","",htmldata) > would cut out everything before first "<!--" and last "-->" in the > document. > Can i force re to math as narrow as possible ? > (to match first "<!--" with the first "-->" after the "<!--" and to repeat > this procedure while mentioned pattern is still found) ? > > Thanx -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list