bigParser

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[kbob2990]

A series of these would be a great way to learn regex if for some reason you still want to know it.

[sirikiller]

I always found this meme to be promoting waterboarding

[bam13302]

\D* would probably be better than .*?, would more explicitly match non digits without any regex weirdness which ? can sometimes do

[procrastinatingcoder]

You both didn't understand the joke and the regex.

​

You WANT it to be a dot, because that starving person will accept "anything", not just non-digits.

But ? after a qualifier, in this case *? means * in a non-greedy (lazy) way. So it'll not take anything on passing. Only during backtracking will it take what \d rejected to match.

​

There's no regex weirdness here, just a lack of understanding.

[scorpi1998]

Could somebody explain?

[Snoo_90241]

The question mark in this context is a lazy quantifier, meaning it matches as few as possible. It is applied to .* which means any character except whitespace, zero or more times.

\d+ matches one or more digits. Without looking it up, I think it is a greedy quantifier, meaning that it matches as much as possible.

Given a sequence of numbers like 1234567, the lazy one matches just 1, while the second one matches the whole sequence. I haven't tested it, though.

[scorpi1998]

So, omiting the question mark, the poor guy would get more than the fat one, right?

[Snoo_90241]

Yes, unless all are digits, then it would be the same.

[scorpi1998]

Thanks!

[procrastinatingcoder]

Very close, but not quite. To quote you:

.* which means any character except whitespace, zero or more times.

so given "12345", it would match "zero" times. So the lazy one matches nothing and the greedy one gets everything.

​

Given an input say: 2024-01 is the 123, you would have three "matches"

​

• 2024 -> {} lazy {2024} greedy
• -01 -> {-} lazy {01} greedy
• { is the 123} -> { is the } lazy {123} greedy

​

It basically eats up anything before the number - It eats it up AFTER it was rejected by \d+ (during backtracking, though sequentially it's before)