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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T00:50:47+00:00

I’m doing a non-greedy match like this ‘(?<C2>.+?)’ to find a group inside a

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I’m doing a non-greedy match like this

'(?<C2>.+?)'

to find a group inside a quotes. This works well, until I want to do something like this

'(?<C2>.+?)' as

to match something in quotes followed by a space, following by the word as.

But now, the following will not match as desired

'hello'123'hello2' as

I want this to not match at all…but it ends up matching the whole chunk 

'hello'123'hello2'

as C2

What’s the best way to force the non-greedy .+? to include up to the first occurance of a ', not the first occurance of ' as

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This seems to work

    (?<C2>'[^']+')(?= as)

    Explanation

    NODE                     EXPLANATION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  (?<C2>                   group and capture to C2:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    '                        '\''
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    [^']+                    any character except: ''' (1 or more
                             times (matching the most amount
                             possible))
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    '                        '\''
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  )                        end of \1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  (?=                      look ahead to see if there is:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     as                      ' as'
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  )                        end of look-ahead

    Even without the lookahead (?= as), (?<C2>'[^']+') will match quoted strings in a non-greedy way as expected.

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