Question

In the example below I am trying to capture the text between the two asterixes.

var str="The *rain in SPAIN* stays mainly in the plain"; 
var patt1=/\*...\*/;
console.log(str.match(patt1));

I’m trying to follow the example here

http://www.regular-expressions.info/examples.html

\Q…\E Matches the characters between \Q and \E literally,
suppressing the meaning of special characters.

But I am having trouble following along

Answer 1

Try

var str="The *rain in SPAIN* stays mainly in the plain"; 
var patt1=/\*.*\*/;
console.log(str.match(patt1));

The \* means the literal “*” character. Then the . means any character and * means any number of times, so .* means “any number of characters”.

---

Optional bonus:

The code above should work fine, but you’ll notice that it matches greedily. So with input abcd*efgh*ijkl*mnop, the output will be *efgh*ijkl*, whereas you might have preferred the non-greedy match *efgh*.

To do this, use

var patt1=/\*.*?\*/;

The ? operator indicates non-greediness and ensures the least number of characters possible to get to the next \* are eaten, whereas without the ?, the most characters possible to get to the next \* are eaten.

To learn more I recommend http://www.regular-expressions.info/repeat.html . In particular read the “laziness instead of greediness” part.