How to remove single attribute with quotes via RegEx

Question

I am trying to match an attribute to I can do a search/replace. I am having trouble though because it is matching beyond the quotes of the attribute I want. For example, I want to remove xref="..." from here:

<a href="page.ashx" xref="somethingelse" title="something" class="image">

But when I do a RegEx like this: xref=\".*\", then it selects the attributes xref, title, AND class. How do I tell it to only select the xref attribute?

Answer 1

I strongly suggest using something other than regex for modifying markup, however, this should work:

xref="[^"]*"

Answer 2

Use the non-greedy version: \".*?\"

.* is greedy selects as much as possible. By adding a ? to it becomes less greedy selecting just as much as needed.