Question

I would like to get “begin print x;;;” in python by re.search from this:
fv (x,y,z) begin print x;;; print y ;;; return x + y + z end;

I tried this: begin = re.search("begin .+;;;", line)

But this returns the following string: “begin print x;;; print y ;;;”
Any idea?

Answer 1

Repetition is greedy by default, meaning that it will match as many characters as possible. This results in the .+ passing right by the first ;;; and matching the rest of the string up until the final ;;;.

To prevent this, change the .+ to .+?, which makes the repetition lazy (match as few characters as possible):

begin = re.search("begin .+?;;;", line)