How to make Regular expression into non-greedy?

Rueta picture Rueta · May 13, 2010 · Viewed 118.9k times · Source

I'm using jQuery. I have a string with a block of special characters (begin and end). I want get the text from that special characters block. I used a regular expression object for in-string finding. But how can I tell jQuery to find multiple results when have two special character or more?

My HTML:

<div id="container">
    <div id="textcontainer">
     Cuộc chiến pháp lý giữa [|cơ thử|nghiệm|] thị trường [|test2|đây là test lần 2|] chứng khoán [|Mỹ|day la nuoc my|] và ngân hàng đầu tư quyền lực nhất Phố Wall mới chỉ bắt đầu.
    </div>
</div>

and my JavaScript code:

$(document).ready(function() {
  var takedata = $("#textcontainer").text();
  var test = 'abcd adddb';
  var filterdata = takedata.match(/(\[.+\])/);

  alert(filterdata); 

  //end write js 
});

My result is: [|cơ thử|nghiệm|] thị trường [|test2|đây là test lần 2|] chứng khoán [|Mỹ|day la nuoc my|] . But this isn't the result I want :(. How to get [text] for times 1 and [demo] for times 2 ?


I've just done my work after searching info on internet ^^. I make code like this:

var filterdata = takedata.match(/(\[.*?\])/g);
  • my result is : [|cơ thử|nghiệm|],[|test2|đây là test lần 2|] this is right!. but I don't really understand this. Can you answer my why?

Answer

Asaph picture Asaph · May 13, 2010

The non-greedy regex modifiers are like their greedy counter-parts but with a ? immediately following them:

*  - zero or more
*? - zero or more (non-greedy)
+  - one or more
+? - one or more (non-greedy)
?  - zero or one
?? - zero or one (non-greedy)