Is there a way to use ungreedy matching in JavaScript for regular expressions?

javascript regex bbcode non-greedy
okoman picture okoman · Dec 12, 2008 · Viewed 7.1k times · Source

I wonder if there is a way to use ungreedy matching in JavaScript? I tried the U modifer, but it doesn't seem to work.

I want to write a small BBCode parser in JavaScript, but without ungreedy matching it isn't possible (at least as far as I see it) to do something like this:

'[b]one[/b] two [b]three[/b]'.replace( /\[b\](.*)\[\/b\]/, '<b>$1</b>' );

But such a replacement would be nice since there is no need to check for HTML validity then. Unclosed markups will stay simple text.

Answer

Greg picture Greg · Dec 12, 2008

You can use ? after * or + to make it ungreedy, e.g. (.*?)

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