wow! i conceed.. you are right..doing a bit of testing, i've realized that i
have assumed something about the ? that is not quite right.
using "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy bear"
...*b will match "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy "
...*?b will match "the quick "
my mistake here was in the interpretaton of the ? (normally meaning optional)
and i'm guessing that when used next to a * or + (and you did just say this) it
means "lazy match"
i'm glad this came up cause that actually answers my question about how to
solve the matching between tags.
man i feel like a schmuck now. ;)
-Chris
>chris porter wrote:
>> i wouldnt say confused.. i think the correct term should be "less
>> greedy".. but in the eyes of someone learning.. its easier to
>> describe '.*' (very greedy) as all consuming and uses lots of
>> backtracking.. and [^x]* as stoping at X (minimal backtracking and
>> fewer captured characters)
>
>I completely disagree. There is a technical definition of greediness.
>See below, or "Mastering Regular Expressions" from O'Reilly, or the Perl
>documentation, etc.
>
>
>That actually isn't what "greedy" means. Greediness means that the
>sub-expression will match the most characters possible while still
>allowing the expression as a whole to match. Non-greedy or lazy
>matching matches the fewest characters that will allow the expression as
>a whole to match. Generally, the terms greedy and non-greedy or lazy
>are only applied to the * and + operators, though I've seen it in
>reference to the {n,m} and {n} constructs on occasion.
>
>--Ben
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