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Asked: 2026-06-04T12:35:24+00:00

I’m trying to separate the hosts from this file, but my regex selects both

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I’m trying to separate the hosts from this file, but my regex selects both hosts together:

timestamps|||scan_start|Tue May  1 23:00:29 2012|timestamps||foo.com|host_start|Tue May  1     23:16:51 2012|results|-0017\ntimestamps||foo.com|host_end|Tue May  1 23:19:17     2012|timestamps||bar.com|host_start|Tue May  1 23:24:31 2012|results|general/tcp|Sendmail 8.13.8\n\n\ntimestamps||bar.com|host_end|Tue May  1 23:29:11 2012|timestamps|||scan_end|Wed May  2 00:19:40 2012|

regex:

timestamps\|\|[\w,\.]*\|host_start.*host_end
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Make the star lazy:

    timestamps\|\|[\w,.]*\|host_start.*?host_end

    .* is “greedy”, matching as much as it can. .*? is “lazy” and matches as little as possible to achieve a match. Therefore it will match only until the closest host_end and not until the last one.

    Also, no need to escape the dot inside a character class. And do you really want to allow a comma in the character class, or did you mean [\w.]*?

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