Question

I am trying to match everything inside double curly brackets in a string. I am using the following expression:

\{\{.*\}\}

Some examples:

The {{dog}} is not a cat. This correctly matches {{dog}}

However,
The {{dog}} is a {{cat}} matches everything after the first match instead of returning two matches. I want it to match twice, once for {{dog}} and once for {{cat}}

Does anyone know how to do this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The greedy .* matches anything (except line breaks), so when there are more than one }} in the string, it always matches the last }} (if there aren’t any \r and \n between the two }}!).

Try to make the .* match reluctant (ungreedy) like this:

\{\{.*?}}

That’s correct, you needn’t escape the }.

You could also do:

\{\{[^}]*}}

if a {{ ... }} cannot contain a single } itself.