(.*?) or (.*)

I've seen people use either (.*?) or (.*) for wild, what is the difference?

dot means match everything, star means match one or more times.

question mark means the match is optional.

I dont really know why someone would use '.*?' when they wanted '.*'

Not quite.



Dot means match any character except new line characters.



Star means zero or more times.



Right after a greedy operator (like STAR or PLUS) the question mark is a reluctant quantifier (aka a "ungreedy" quantifier).



Here's a good reason why: http://www.regular-expressions.info/repeat.html (see the paragraph "Watch Out for The Greediness!")

Check out the link from my previous reply.

Non-Greedy matches are usually better due to most people use a greedy match such as:

/^staticstring(.*)anotherstaticstring$/

With the above the regex engine will do a ton of back referencing/tracking to find where "a" from "anotherstaticstring" occurs to know where to cut off the greedy matching.

By doing (.*?) if changes the way it looks for the start of the literal match.

The same approach works for something like (\d+?) I believe as well.

Correct me if i'm wrong but this has been my experience in my everyday battles with regex.

An in my opinion better explanation is give in the link I posted earlier.

Even setting aside the greedy v. non-greediness of those constructs, it's worth pointing out that using dot-star is not necessarily recommended if you can make your regexp tighter.