Matching text between delimiters: greedy or lazy regular expression?

Question

For the common problem of matching text between delimiters (e.g. < and >), there\'s two common patterns:

• using the greedy *

Answer 1

The first is more explicit, i. e. it definitely excludes the closing delimiter from being part of the matched text. This is not guaranteed in the second case (if the regular expression is extended to match more than just this tag).

Example: If you try to match Hello! with <.*?>Hello!, the regex will match

Hello!

whereas <[^>]*>Hello! will match

Hello!