regex how to get a non-greedy match

Question

Let's say I have a text:

cool randomtext1 cool randomtext2 cool randomtext3 good cool

How would I match the most inner

cool randomtext3 good

When I try

r'cool.*?good'

It matches

cool randomtext1 cool randomtext2 cool randomtext3 good

@stribizhev 0 not a duplicate, but a spinoff question from my original — airnet, Dec 15 '15 at 19:10
Same *tempered greedy token* solution here and there. Here, the answerer does not even name the term. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Dec 15 '15 at 19:11
nevermind, you are right...:-), I didn't see the link before — airnet, Dec 15 '15 at 20:11

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 15 '15 at 18:51

You can use this look-around based regex:

r'\bcool\b(?:(?!\b(cool|good)\b).)*\bgood\b'

Here (?:(?!\b(cool|good)\b).)* will match 0 or more of any text that is not cool or good. \b has been used for word boundaries.

RegEx Demo

This will match cool randomtext3 good.

Code:

p = re.compile(ur'\bcool\b(?:(?!\b(cool|good)\b).)*\bgood\b')
test_str = u"cool randomtext1 cool randomtext2 cool randomtext3 good cool"

re.findall(p, test_str)

regex how to get a non-greedy match

1 Answers1