Problem when capturing text between two letters

Question

I am using the following regular expression to get text between /* and */:

(/\*)+(.+)(\*/)

this works fine when this only needs to happen once e.g the whole string is just

/* hello */
it only needs to capture once

but if there is more than one time where it needs to be captured it grabs what ever is in between for example:

/* hello */
it only needs to capture more than once [THIS ALSO GET'S HIGHLIGHTED]
/* second time */

Why does this happen?

Answer 1

Because you're telling it to. By default, regexp's are greedy, meaning that they will match the longest thing they can.

In Perl regexp, you can override that behaviour by

(/\*)+(.+?)(\*/)

The '?' tells the '+' to match the shortest string it can, instead of the longest.