Question

I am having trouble with regex lazy matching. It’s hard to explain without an example:

My regex: A\d*?(88)?\d*?B

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Example 1: A12388456B

What I want: matches string, group 1 matches the “88”

What happens: matches string, but group 1 is not matched.

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Example 2: A123B

What I want: matches string, group 1 not matched.

What happens: works correctly

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Basically I want group 1 to match the “88” if it appears, but I want to also match any pattern A\d+B.

This seems like it should be simple, but I am having trouble.

Answer 1

Try out this regex in Javascript:

 'A12388456B'.match(/A(?:\d*?(88))?\d*?B/);
 > ["A12388456B", "88"]  // Matches string and 88.

 'A123B'.match(/A(?:\d*?(88))?\d*?B/);
 > ["A123B", undefined]  // Matches string but nothing else.

In the first example, group 1 captures 88.