Regex: text between first occurrence of two patterns

Question

/url?q=http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man_(film)&sa=U&ei=iavVUKuFGsrNswbz74GQBA&ved=0CBYQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNEth5YspFPWp6CInyAfknlEvVgIfA

Answer 1

You need to use reluctant matching to match till the first &. With greedy matching (i.e. using * instead of *?), your pattern will match as long string as possible so as to satisfy the complete pattern.

So use this: -

\?q=(.*?)&

Or you can also use character class with negated & which matches every character except &: -

\?q=([^&]*)

Note that, if you don't want your (.*?) to match empty string, then you should use + quantifier. It matches 1 or more occurrence.

Answer 2

If your in python then sub(r'(\/url\?q\=)|[&][\S]*','',url) should do your work

Answer 3

You just need to make the * operator lazy, and you do it by adding a ? after it. So it would be .*?

Lazy (or non greedy) means that will stop after the first occurrence of that match, instead of the last one.

Answer 4

Try:

\?q=([^&]+)

and capture the first group.