How to grep lines that begin with a specified string and end with another specified string?

Question

For example how would I get lines that begin with foo and end with bar?

Example lines:

foo12345abar
fooabcdbar
fooy7ghqqbar

This does not seem to work

grep '^foo[.]*bar$'

What is the correct regex?

Answer 1

^foo.*?bar$

Here is the working DEMO.

Answer 2

The reason your expression does not work is because [.] represents a dot, literally. Your expression would match strings that look like this:

foo.......bar
foo...bar
boobar

To make it work remove square brackets [] around the dot meta-character:

^foo.*bar$

Demo.