Greedy Nature

Overview of greedy nature

RegExs are known for being greedy. RegEx’s greedy nature aims to match as many characters as possible before passing control to the next part of the expression.

Let’s look at an example. The text provided to you is ‘firstname’ ‘lastname’ ‘address’.

Consider the zero-based indexing for a better understanding. For the text mentioned above, a single quotation appears at index[0], a lowercase character “f” appears at index[1], a lowercase character “s” appears at index[30], and a single quote appears at index[31] and so on for the text. A single quotation appears at index[0], a wildcard character appears at index[1], and so on for the RegEx.