Question

So I have the following regular expression:

https?://(www\.)?flickr\.com/photos/(.+)/?

To match against the following URL:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/username/

How can I stop the final forward slash (/) from being included in the username sub-pattern (.+)?

I have tried:

https?://(www\.)?flickr\.com/photos/(.+?)/?

But then it only matches the first letter of the username.

Answer 1

https?://(?:www\.)?flickr\.com/photos/([^/]+)/?

I added ?: to the first group so it’s not capturing, then used [^/] instead of the dot in the last match. This assures you that everything between “photos/” and the very next “/” is captured.

If you need to capture the first www just use this:

https?://(www\.)?flickr\.com/photos/([^/]+)/?