Stop a regex matching *everything* after what I want to actually match! [duplicate]

Question

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• My regex is matching too much. How do I make it stop? 5 answers

I am quite new to the whole Regex thing and tried to do a preg_match_all in PHP which, kind of the results I wanted but the problem is it matches everything after what I actually wanted... like so:

String: This is something <code>Some code here</code> and more Match from Regex: <code>Some code here</code> and more Wanted match from Regex: <code>Some code here</code>

Here is my regular expression that I'm using: /<code>(.*)<\/code>/

I think its something to do with the beginning and ending / delimiters but I'm not entirely sure.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

The star is greedy, meaning it will match as much as it can. Use

(.*?)

instead, making it lazy. You can also use negated character classes:

!<code>([^<]*)</code>!

EDIT: Since mvds deleted his/her answer, here's a tip: You can avoid having to escape the slash (/) if you don't use it as a delimiter, like I did above ^ (used ! )

Here's a good resource on regex:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/repeat.html

Answer 2

you want to make the .* be non greedy. If you put a ? after that part of the pattern it will match everything up to the next part of the regex that matches. So make the regex /<code>(.*?)<\/code>/

Answer 3

You need to disable greediness. Use .*? instead, I believe.

Answer 4

I'm not 100% sure how this is even compiling - you need to escape the second / as so:

/<code>(.*)<\/code>/

So that PHP recognises it as a character to match rather than the end of the regular expression (I think it may be compiling as a substitute regex).