[Python-Dev] Re: Some questions about maintenance of the regular expression code.

[A.M. Kuchling]

M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> Hmm, could you explain where ".*?" is useful ?

The most common example comes from writing a regex to match bits of 
HTML.  If you have a pattern like this:

   <a href="([^"]*)"> (.*) </a>

and your input text is

    <a href="a">blah</a> <a href="b">blah</a>,

group 2 in the pattern will match 'blah</a> <a href="b">blah', which is 
not the link text that you want.  If you write .*?,
then group 2 matches just "blah", which is more useful.

--amk                                                    (www.amk.ca)
Ominous, isn't it?
       -- The Doctor, in "The Awakening"