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Asked: 2026-06-13T07:29:07+00:00

I am writing a regex that will be used for recognizing commands in a

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I am writing a regex that will be used for recognizing commands in a string. I have three possible words the commands could start with and they always end with a semi-colon.

I believe the regex pattern should look something like this:

(command1|command2|command3).+;

The problem, I have found, is that since . matches any character and + tells it to match one or more, it skips right over the first instance of a semi-colon and continues going.

Is there a way to get it to stop at the first instance of a semi-colon it comes across? Is there something other than . that I should be using instead?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The issue you are facing with this: (command1|command2|command3).+; is that the + is greedy, meaning that it will match everything till the last value.

    To fix this, you will need to make it non-greedy, and to do that you need to add the ? operator, like so: (command1|command2|command3).+?;

    Just as an FYI, the same applies for the * operator. Adding a ? will make it non greedy.

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