Question

I am kinda new to this Regex thing.

When analyzing some code I frequently come across the pattern .+? or (.+?)

I can’t seem to find the meaning of this pattern using my noobish deductive reasoning.

Answer 1

. means any character (except a new line). + means one or more. ? in this context mean lazy or non-greedy. That means it will try to match the absolute minimum of characters that satisfy the quantifier. Example:

> 'abc'.match(/.+/)
["abc"]
> 'abc'.match(/.+?/)
["a"]
> 'abc'.match(/.*/)
["abc"]
> 'abc'.match(/.*?/)
[""]