What do 'lazy' and 'greedy' mean i

2018-12-30 23:51发布

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Could someone explain these two terms in an understandable way?

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若你有天会懂
2楼-- · 2018-12-31 00:02

Greedy matching. The default behavior of regular expressions is to be greedy. That means it tries to extract as much as possible until it conforms to a pattern even when a smaller part would have been syntactically sufficient.

Example:

import re
text = "<body>Regex Greedy Matching Example </body>"
re.findall('<.*>', text)
#> ['<body>Regex Greedy Matching Example </body>']

Instead of matching till the first occurrence of ‘>’, it extracted the whole string. This is the default greedy or ‘take it all’ behavior of regex.

Lazy matching, on the other hand, ‘takes as little as possible’. This can be effected by adding a ? at the end of the pattern.

Example:

re.findall('<.*?>', text)
#> ['<body>', '</body>']

If you want only the first match to be retrieved, use the search method instead.

re.search('<.*?>', text).group()
#> '<body>'

Source: Python Regex Examples

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骚的不知所云
3楼-- · 2018-12-31 00:02

Greedy means it will consume your pattern until there are none of them left and it can look no further.

Lazy will stop as soon as it will encounter the first pattern you requested.

One common example that I often encounter is \s*-\s*? of a regex ([0-9]{2}\s*-\s*?[0-9]{7})

The first \s* is classified as greedy because of * and will look as many white spaces as possible after the digits are encountered and then look for a dash character "-". Where as the second \s*? is lazy because of the present of *? which means that it will look the first white space character and stop right there.

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刘海飞了
4楼-- · 2018-12-31 00:05

As far as I know, most regex engine is greedy by default. Add a question mark at the end of quantifier will enable lazy match.

As @Andre S mentioned in comment.

  • Greedy: Keep searching until condition is not satisfied.
  • Lazy: Stop searching once condition is satisfied.

Refer to the example below for what is greedy and what is lazy.

import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String args[]){
        String money = "100000000999";
        String greedyRegex = "100(0*)";
        Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(greedyRegex);
        Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(money);
        while(matcher.find()){
            System.out.println("I'm greeedy and I want " + matcher.group() + " dollars. This is the most I can get.");
        }

        String lazyRegex = "100(0*?)";
        pattern = Pattern.compile(lazyRegex);
        matcher = pattern.matcher(money);
        while(matcher.find()){
            System.out.println("I'm too lazy to get so much money, only " + matcher.group() + " dollars is enough for me");
        }
    }
}

The result is:

I'm greeedy and I want 100000000 dollars. This is the most I can get.

I'm too lazy to get so much money, only 100 dollars is enough for me

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大哥的爱人
5楼-- · 2018-12-31 00:10

Greedy will consume as much as possible. From http://www.regular-expressions.info/repeat.html we see the example of trying to match HTML tags with <.+>. Suppose you have the following:

<em>Hello World</em>

You may think that <.+> (. means any non newline character and + means one or more) would only match the <em> and the </em>, when in reality it will be very greedy, and go from the first < to the last >. This means it will match <em>Hello World</em> instead of what you wanted.

Making it lazy (<.+?>) will prevent this. By adding the ? after the +, we tell it to repeat as few times as possible, so the first > it comes across, is where we want to stop the matching.

I'd encourage you to download RegExr, a great tool that will help you explore Regular Expressions - I use it all the time.

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十年一品温如言
6楼-- · 2018-12-31 00:12

Taken From www.regular-expressions.info

Greediness: Greedy quantifiers first tries to repeat the token as many times as possible, and gradually gives up matches as the engine backtracks to find an overall match.

Laziness: Lazy quantifier first repeats the token as few times as required, and gradually expands the match as the engine backtracks through the regex to find an overall match.

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千与千寻千般痛.
7楼-- · 2018-12-31 00:15 
+-------------------+-----------------+------------------------------+
| Greedy quantifier | Lazy quantifier |        Description           |
+-------------------+-----------------+------------------------------+
| *                 | *?              | Star Quantifier: 0 or more   |
| +                 | +?              | Plus Quantifier: 1 or more   |
| ?                 | ??              | Optional Quantifier: 0 or 1  |
| {n}               | {n}?            | Quantifier: exactly n        |
| {n,}              | {n,}?           | Quantifier: n or more        |
| {n,m}             | {n,m}?          | Quantifier: between n and m  |
+-------------------+-----------------+------------------------------+

Add a ? to a quantifier to make it ungreedy i.e lazy.

Example:
test string : stackoverflow
greedy reg expression : s.*o output: stackoverflow
lazy reg expression : s.*?o output: stackoverflow

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