Find Characters with Lazy Matching # 27

In regular expressions, a greedy match finds the longest possible part of a string that fits the regex pattern and returns it as a match. The alternative is called a lazy match, which finds the smallest possible part of the string that satisfies the regex pattern.

You can apply the regex /t[a-z]*i/ to the string "titanic". This regex is basically a pattern that starts with t, ends with i, and has some letters in between.

Regular expressions are by default greedy, so the match would return ["titani"]. It finds the largest sub-string possible to fit the pattern.

However, you can use the? character to change it to lazy matching. "titanic" matched against the adjusted regex of /t[a-z]*?i/ returns ["ti"].

Note: Parsing HTML with regular expressions should be avoided, but pattern matching an HTML string with regular expressions is completely fine.