Why is the star quantifier greedier than the plus quantifier in Java regular expressions?

Question

I have text I'm trying to extract from LogicalID and SupplyChain from

 <LogicalID>SupplyChain</Logical>

At first I used the following regex:

.*([A-Za-z]+)>([A-Za-z]+)<.*

This matched as follows:

["D", "SupplyChain"]

In a fit of desperation, I tried using the asterisk instead of the plus:

.*([A-Za-z]*)>([A-Za-z]+)<.*

This matched perfectly.

The documentation says * matches zero or more times and + matches one or more times. Why is * greedier than +?

EDIT: It's been pointed out to me that this isn't the case below. The order of operations explains why the first match group is actually null.

Answer 1

It's not a difference in greediness. In your first regex:

.*([A-Za-z]+)>([A-Za-z]+)<.*

You are asking for any amount of characters (.*), then at least a letter, then a >. So the greedy match has to be D, since * consumes everything before D.

In the second one, instead:

.*([A-Za-z]*)>([A-Za-z]+)<.*

You want any amount of characters, followed by any amount of letters, then the >. So the first * consumes everything up to the >, and the first capture group matches an empty string. I don't think that it "matches perfectly" at all.