JavaScript: Functional Programming for JavaScript Developers
by Ved Antani, Simon Timms, Dan Mantyla
Greedy and lazy quantifiers
All the quantifiers that we discussed so far are greedy. A greedy quantifier starts looking at the entire string for a match. If there are no matches, it removes the last character in the string and reattempts the match. If a match is not found again, the last character is again removed and the process is repeated until a match is found or the string is left with no characters.
The \d+ pattern, for example, will match one or more digits. For example, if your string is 123, a greedy match would match 1, 12, and 123. Greedy pattern h.+l would match hell in a string hello—which is the longest possible string match. As \d+ is greedy, it will match as many digits as possible and hence the match would be 123.
In contrast to ...
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