Consider the following regular expression which is searching for a word followed by a parenthesis:
(.*)(\w+)\(
If this expression is fed a string like:
int fred()
it will match but the contents of group 1 will be 'int fre' and the contents of group 2 will be 'd'. This is because the expression '.*' is greedy and will grab as much of the string as it can, even stuff that matches '\w+'. To stop the greediness the quantifier should be followed by a question mark, e.g.
(.*?)(\w+)\(
With this group 1 will become 'int ' and group 2 will become 'fred'.
This works with the python 're' module.
Peter's Moblog
