Is the error in starting my regexp with (.*)?.

Your regexp doesn't start with that. Did you mean to type (.+) perhaps? Either way, yes, that's probably the issue. All of your .+ elements will greedily match as much text as possible while still allowing the entire thing to match. When you have several of them in the same regexp, there's a good chance they will match more of your text than you expect. It may help to make them non-greedy by changing them to .+? , or make sure they can't match certain characters by using an exclusionary character class like ([^"]+) to match as many non-double-quote characters as possible. Or find a different way to parse out the data you need.