What do 'lazy' and 'greedy' mean in the context of regular expressions?

Solution 1:

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 reality it will be very greedy, and go from the first < to the last >. This means it will match <em>Hello World</em> instead of what you wanted.

Making it lazy (<.+?>) will prevent this. By adding the ? after the +, we tell it to repeat as few times as possible, so the first > it comes across, is where we want to stop the matching.

I'd encourage you to download RegExr, a great tool that will help you explore Regular Expressions - I use it all the time.

Solution 2:

'Greedy' means match longest possible string.

'Lazy' means match shortest possible string.

For example, the greedy h.+l matches 'hell' in 'hello' but the lazy h.+?l matches 'hel'.