CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex.htaccessurl-rewriting
CRAIG
CRAIG

Reputation: 1029

Regex not matching the first occurence of my string

In this url:

 http://example.com/SearchResult-Empty.html?caty[]=12345&caty[]=45678

I am trying to use the following regex to grab the first occurence of caty which should be "12345". However, instead, the regex below is giving me the final occurrence 45678. I tried using the "?" limiter to make it non-greedy per other stack overflow questions, but it isn't working. How can I do this?

 ^SearchResult(?:.*)(caty)(?:.*)\=([0-9]+)\&?$

Upvotes: 2

Views: 108

Answers (2)

Downgoat
Downgoat

Reputation: 14361

As far as I can tell, two things are messing you up:

  • The anchors ^ and $ seem to be forcing the regex to produce bad matches
  • You are using greedy .* instead of non-greedy .*?
SearchResult(?:.*?)(caty)(?:.*?)\=([0-9]+)\&?

Should do the job

Upvotes: 1

paxdiablo
paxdiablo

Reputation: 881463

^SearchResult(?:.*)(caty)(?:.*)\=([0-9]+)\&?$
                ^^

.* is greedy matching, meaning that it will go the the last occurrence of caty rather than the first. You could check that by providing three caty's in the input string and it will then skip the first two.

.*? makes it non-greedy (aka reluctant), which will consume as little as possible to make a match - stopping at the first occurrence of caty.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions