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 .*?
Duncan Murdoch
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