On 25/01/2023 7:19 p.m., Duncan Murdoch wrote:
The docs for ?regexp say this: "By default repetition is greedy, so the maximal possible number of repeats is used. This can be changed to ‘minimal’ by appending ? to the quantifier. (There are further quantifiers that allow approximate matching: see the TRE documentation.)"I want the minimal match, but I don't seem to be getting it. For example, x <- "abaca" grep("a.*?a", x, value = TRUE) #> [1] "abaca" Shouldn't I have gotten "aba", which is the first match to "a.*a"? If not, what would be the regexp that would give me the first match to "a.*a", without greedy expansion of the .*?
Sorry, that was a dumb question. Of course grep returned the whole thing. I should be using regexpr() or some related function to extract the match.
Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
