User Guide › Design › Data Acquisition › Adapters › Regular Expression Syntax › Non-greedy Repeats

Non-greedy Repeats

Whenever the "extended" regular expression syntax is in use (the default) then non-greedy repeats are possible by appending a '?' after the repeat; a non-greedy repeat is one which will match the shortest possible string.

For example to match html tag pairs one could use something like:

"<\s*tagname[^>]*>(.*?)<\s*/tagname\s*>"

In this case $1 will contain the text between the tag pairs, and will be the shortest possible matching string.