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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T06:55:23+00:00

For the common problem of matching text between delimiters (e.g. < and > ),

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For the common problem of matching text between delimiters (e.g. < and >), there’s two common patterns:

  • using the greedy * or + quantifier in the form START [^END]* END, e.g. <[^>]*>, or
  • using the lazy *? or +? quantifier in the form START .*? END, e.g. <.*?>.

Is there a particular reason to favour one over the other?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Some advantages:

    [^>]*:

    • More expressive.
    • Captures newlines regardless of /s flag.
    • Considered quicker, because the engine doesn’t have to backtracks to find a successful match (with [^>] the engine doesn’t make choices – we give it only one way to match the pattern against the string).

    .*?

    • No “code duplication” – the end character only appears once.
    • Simpler in cases the end delimiter is more than a character long. (a character class would not work in this case) A common alternative is (?:(?!END).)*. This is even worse if the END delimiter is another pattern.
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