How does work meta-character '.' with character class

Asked Oct 14 '19 at 10:27

Active Oct 14 '19 at 10:38

Viewed 19 times

I've learned about regular expressions recently. So far I had no problems with understanding, but there is one case which confuses me:

.+[123]

If I understand it correctly, in this case expression ".+" should iterate through every character until one of this characters appears [123]. However in cases like this:

abc abc abc 21 efg efg 2344

It matches "abc abc abc 21 efg efg 23" ignoring 2,1,2.

Why does it happen? (I use regex101.com for checking)

I used search in order to find something, but I didn't find anything about this case. I made a workaround [^123]+[123], but I want to understand why this happens.

edited Oct 14 '19 at 10:35

asked Oct 14 '19 at 10:27

Avtem

`.+` matches 1+ chars as many as possible, `.+?` will match 1+ chars as few as possible. – Wiktor Stribiżew Oct 14 '19 at 10:29
Look at the regex101 debugger – Paolo Oct 14 '19 at 10:30
And make sure you read [this thread](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2301285/what-do-lazy-and-greedy-mean-in-the-context-of-regular-expressions) – Wiktor Stribiżew Oct 14 '19 at 10:38
@WiktorStribiżew Thank you, all tutorials I've read or watched didn't mention about this. This comment is answer to my question. – Avtem Oct 14 '19 at 10:40

How does work meta-character '.' with character class

0 Answers0