regexp help request thread

ILX-code woes made me remove the bit where I set $, to \n for human-readable output; posted it and then realised I could just have used any character except curly braces after my qq

I think I misunderstood the % symbols!

but yeah "%(.*?)%" works

That works, but why doesn't "% are nice but %" count as a match?

the bit in the middle u mean? because that % symbol ("% are ...") has already been matched in its "%cats%" incarnation.

iow "%(.*?)%" will match "%cats%", the processor will then go to work on the remaining part, "are nice but %strings% are stringy", and match "%strings%".

you can also "force non-greedy" with [^\n\r]*