I’ll give it a shot. A greedy quantifier first matches as much as possible. So the .* matches the entire string. Then the matcher tries to match the f following, but there are no characters left. So it “backtracks”, making the greedy quantifier match one less character (leaving the “o” at the end of the … Read more
The non-greedy ? works perfectly fine. It’s just that you need to select dot matches all option in the regex engines (regexpal, the engine you used, also has this option) you are testing with. This is because, regex engines generally don’t match line breaks when you use .. You need to tell them explicitly that … Read more
Neither basic nor extended Posix/GNU regex recognizes the non-greedy quantifier; you need a later regex. Fortunately, Perl regex for this context is pretty easy to get: perl -pe ‘s|(http://.*?/).*|\1|’
Instead of .* use .\{-}. %s/style=”.\{-}”//g Also, see :help non-greedy
Greedy will consume as much as possible. From http://www.regular-expressions.info/repeat.html we see the example of trying to match HTML tags with <.+>. Suppose you have the following: <em>Hello World</em> You may think that <.+> (. means any non newline character and + means one or more) would only match the <em> and the </em>, when in … Read more