CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexvi
vloche
vloche

Reputation: 163

Regex non greedy match with tab character

I do not understand why if given the following line (vi with set list on) 

10.0.6.5^IVirtual^IVmware^IHTTP, MS SQL, Windows SVC^IcpHelpdesk $

Why the following regex:

^I.*?^I

does not match the string 'Virtual' in my line above? I am using the regex below in my VI search and replace

:%s/^I.*?^I/replace/g

this returns no match however on the same string if I use

^I.*^I

I would get 

10.0.6.5replaceIcpHelpdesk $

What I attempting to say with ^I.*?^I is from the first tab character (^I) match anything (with the dot except line breaks) zero or more times ( *? ) until you come to the next token with is the tab character (^I)

I don't see what I am missing and any help would be appreciated. Thank you

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3812

Answers (1)

Thor
Thor

Reputation: 47189

Are you talking about vim regex here? In that case the non-greedy quantifier is \{-}:

\t.\{-}\t

Otherwise you can do it by not matching tab characters with a negation group:

\t[^\t]*\t

Upvotes: 1

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