Question

I want to match all text that is encapsulated within <? and ?>. I found a fairly easy way to do this using lookahead:

<\?([^?]|\?(?!>))*\?>

Unfortunately lookahead isn’t supported by the tool I’m writing the regex for. Is there a way around this?

Answer 1

For your specific case, you could simply make the repetition ungreedy:

<\?(.*?)\?>

This will only go until the first ?>. Any single ? before that will be covered by the .*, but when the engine encounters the first ?> it will stop.

Note that (unless you use the DOTALL modifier) this will not work for sections going across multiple lines. If you cannot use the modifier, this will do (platform-independently):

<\?((.|[\r\n])*?)\?>