| TinyApps.Org |
| Small is beautiful |
HOME0. Internet
1. Text
2. Graphics
3. System
4. File
5. Misc
6. Palm
7. OS X
BLOG
DOCS
FAQ
RSS (?)
Grep is greedy; make it less so #
While editing an HTML file in TextWrangler, I needed to find and replace all occurrences of:
<span class="a">text</span>This regex:
\<span class=\"a\"\>.*\<\/span\>returned results like:
<span class="a">text</span><span class="b">more text</span>Using a non-greedy quantifier (the question mark) returned the desired results:
\<span class=\"a\"\>.*?\<\/span\>
UPDATE: Wikipedia has more on lazy quantification: "... modern regular expression tools allow a quantifier to be specified as lazy (also known as non-greedy, reluctant, minimal, or ungreedy) by putting a question mark after the quantifier (e.g., <.*?>) ..."
/mac | Apr 11, 2010
Categories
Blosxom Archive
2012: 5 4 3 2 1
2011: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2010: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2009: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2008: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2007: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2006: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2005: 12 11 10
2011: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2010: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2009: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2008: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2007: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2006: 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2005: 12 11 10
Blogger Archive
Ezine Archive