Re^3: Non-greedy substitution

Your mental model of what «.+?» does is severely flawed. For starters, it doesn't permit patterns to have multiple subpatterns that can match substrings of different lengths.

«.+?» does not mean "the shortest possible match within the string that starts with a comma".

«.+» means "one or more non-LF characters, trying in order of decreasing length", and
«.+?» means "one or more non-LF characters, trying in order of increasing length".

Note that lack of mention of comma. «.+?» doesn't do any checks related to commas. The comma is matched independently.

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Re^4: Non-greedy substitution by Bod (Parson) on Nov 15, 2024 at 21:38 UTC
Your mental model of what Ť.+?ť does is severely flawed Well, yes...hence the need to ask the question... Ť.+?ť doesn't do any checks related to commas But I included the comma in my example...perhaps I could have formatted it so it was more prominent.	[reply]
Re^5: Non-greedy substitution by ikegami (Patriarch) on Nov 18, 2024 at 01:34 UTC
I know. But you said you thought Ť,.+?$ť searches for "the shortest possible match within the string that starts with a comma". Since neither «`,`» nor «`$`» searches for the shortest possible anything (starting with a comma or otherwise), that means you though «`.+?`» did that. «`.+?`» doesn't search for commas, which it would need to do to find "the shortest possible match within the string that starts with a comma".	[reply] [d/l] [select]