Regular Expression : string - '<a><b>c', What pattern makes output '<b>c' ? Pattern '<.*?>c' doesn't work

Question

Sorry. I am not good at English.

string : '<a><b>c'

pattern 1 : '<.*?>' --> expect & output same : '<a>' and '<b>'. OK.

pattern 2 : '<.*?>c' --> expect : '<b>c'. But, output : '<a><b>c' . Why?

I don't know what pattern makes output '<b>c'.

Please, help me.

Note that I am trying to parsing html by python.

Answer 1

Your pattern is behaving as greedy, you can prevent such instances by limiting the chars that can be matched by the regex engine, like this: <[^<>]*>c

import re
s = """<a><b>c"""
print(re.findall(r"<[^<>]*>c", s))
# ['<b>c']

The pattern <[^<>]*>c says that match any char that is not angle brackets.

Although the best way to parse html in python is by using libraries like Beautiful soup or other external libraries.