The (.*) is greedy. Once it captures the entire string it lets the alternation in the parens take over, which backtracks to see if it can find a match, and it can: the '...' is the first match it comes across by moving backwards.

You can use (.*?) to make the expression ungreedy and it will match what you want.

P.S. If you don't need the trailing part, use (?:) instead of ().

In reply to Re: Priority of | regex operator by eff_i_g
in thread Priority of | regex operator by bfdi533

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