RegEx: Smallest possible match or nongreedy match

.net regex regex-greedy non-greedy
Jonathan Allen picture Jonathan Allen · Dec 17, 2009 · Viewed 73.5k times · Source

How do I tell RegEx (.NET version) to get the smallest valid match instead of the largest?

Answer

DMI picture DMI · Dec 17, 2009

For a regular expression like .* or .+, append a question mark (.*? or .+?) to match as few characters as possible. To optionally match a section (?:blah)? but without matching unless absolutely necessary, use something like (?:blah){0,1}?. For a repeating match (either using {n,} or {n,m} syntax) append a question mark to try to match as few as possible (e.g. {3,}? or {5,7}?).

The documentation on regular expression quantifiers may also be helpful.

Related questions

Find and extract a number from a string

I have a requirement to find and extract a number contained within a string. For example, from these strings: string test = "1 test" string test1 = " 1 test" string test2 = "test 99" How can I do this?

Read More
How do I extract text that lies between parentheses (round brackets)?

I have a string User name (sales) and I want to extract the text between the brackets, how would I do this? I suspect sub-string but I can't work out how to read until the closing bracket, the length of …

Read More
How do I access named capturing groups in a .NET Regex?

I'm having a hard time finding a good resource that explains how to use Named Capturing Groups in C#. This is the code that I have so far: string page = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(bytePage); Regex qariRegex = new Regex("<td&…

Read More