Re: Less greedy pattern match

On Thursday 17 April 2008 20:32, pk wrote:

> On Wednesday 16 April 2008 05:23, Ed Morton wrote:
> 
>> There's no "less greedy" operator (to be honest, I'm not sure what that
>> really means or why it'd be more useful than a different RE)
> 
> Well, perl REs have non-greedy match. It can be useful, for example,
when
> parsing html or xml. The classical example is something like this
(please
> note that I'm not a perl guru - alas -):
> 
> $ cat file.html
> <tag><section><t1>foo</t1><t2>blah</t2><t1>bar
> </t1></section>
> <section><t1>baz
> </t1><t2>blah</t2><t1>baz</t1></section></tag>

Of course, <t1>'s could contain other tags, so the usual [^<]* expression
can't be used here.