regex grabbing almost entire string

Question

I have data like the following:

Today's tracker log(F812) was posted at 1500 there will be a new log(F813) tomorrow at 0700.

I am trying to match between each parentheses, instead it is matching almost the entire string.

 \((.*)\)

What am I doing wrong?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2301285/what-do-lazy-and-greedy-mean-in-the-context-of-regular-expressions — Matthew Lock, Jul 21 '14 at 02:13

hwnd · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-21T02:18:23.470

4

* is a greedy quantifier; consuming as much as possible. To make it non-greedy use *?. Once you specify the question mark, you're stating (don't be greedy.. as soon as you find an )... stop, you're done.)

\((.*?)\)
     ^

Live Demo

edited Jul 21 '14 at 02:18

answered Jul 21 '14 at 02:13

hwnd

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 21 '14 at 02:31

There are 3 things to keep in mind when designing your Regex patterns:

Something must appear
Something must not appear
Something may appear (and how many times)

It it quite typical to match pairs like parenthesis and quotes. Use the following pattern:

\(([^)]+)\)

"(" and ")" are "Must appear's" and between them are "Must not appear's" (means you don't expect to meeet a ")" before it. Watch this demo: http://rubular.com/r/Ki9puMZmBJ

regex grabbing almost entire string

2 Answers2