I am not able to fix a greedy regular expression

Question

I need to capture from the beginning of the url to the first instance of the /blog in the example url

the regular expression i have right now is (.*)/blog

is greedy and captures till the the last instance of "/blog" i.e

while my expected result is

can someone help me fix the regular expression

@Avantol13 Putting a `?` after a regular letter `g` will make it match `/blo` too, still greedily in regard of the `(.*)`. — GSerg, Nov 09 '17 at 13:35
Possible duplicate of [Regex too greedy](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8426456/regex-too-greedy) — Aran-Fey, Nov 09 '17 at 13:37

oetoni · Accepted Answer · 2017-11-09T14:28:47.880

1

in your example, this

^(.*?)blog

That will capture all until the first blog mention

and you can play with it here https://regex101.com/r/nYmOeh/1 :)

.*? is the non greedy version of your initial example. Sidyll here gave a perfect explanation on greedy vs non-greedy.

alternatively, capturing all (without blog):

/.+?(?=blog)/

edited Nov 09 '17 at 14:28

answered Nov 09 '17 at 14:08

oetoni

Thanks a lot for this very detailed answer. really helpful – Varun Nov 10 '17 at 13:27

1 Answers1