Searches are greedy by default. But one situation where you want a non-greedy search that is fairly common is finding the contents of an HTML tag.

Let's say you have:

  <a href="?"><b>Hello</b></a>

[download]

If you pattern match using /<(.+)>/ your match will contain "a href="?"><b>Hello</b></a".

If you pattern match using /<(.+?)>/ your match will contain "a href="?"", which is usually what people are looking for.

Having the option is great, more power in your hands to find what you want!

In reply to Re^2: greedy search by monarch
in thread greedy search by palette

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