Regular expression to make non-greedy

Question

I have a text like this

EXPRESS      blood| muscle| testis| normal| tumor| fetus| adult
RESTR_EXPR   soft tissue/muscle tissue tumor

Right now I want to only extract the last item in EXPRESS line, which is adult.

My pattern is:

[|](.*?)\n

The code goes greedy to muscle| testis| normal| tumor| fetus| adult. Can I know if there is any way to solve this issue?

Answer 1

You can take the capture group value exclude matching pipe chars after matching a pipe char followed by optional spaces.

If there has to be a newline at the end of the string:

\|[^\S\n]*([^|\n]*)\n

Explanation

• \| Match |
• [^\S\n]* Match optional whitespace chars without newlines
• ( Capture group 1
  • [^|\n]* Match optional chars except for | or a newline
• ) Close group 1
• \n Match a newline

Regex demo

Or asserting the end of the string:

\|[^\S\n]*([^|\n]*)$

Answer 2

You could use this one. It spares you the space before, handle the \r\n case and is non-greedy:

\|\s*([^\|])*?\r?\n

Tested here