Question

I have simple regex

'\'.*\'' 

for me its says select everything between ‘ and ‘, but it also catches

'text') != -1 || file.indexOf('.exe' 

for me its two strings, for regex its one. how can i make regex to see that its two strings?

P.S. I’m using Java.

Answer 1

That’s the non-greedy form:

'.*?' 

The *? means: ‘Match as little as possible’, while the * alone means ‘Match as much as possible’.

The latter basically goes on until the end of the string, giving characters back one by one so the final ' can match. That’s why you get everything between the first and the very last quote in your string.

// for the sake of completeness: Java would need this pattern string '\'.*?\''