Non greedy pattern match in sed

[Eyal Lebedinsky]

Michael Still wrote:
> 
> Hey,
> 
> I would like non greedy regexp matching in sed.
> 
> i.e.
> 
> echo "/* This is a */ test /* line */" | sed 's/\/\*.*\*\//g'
>                                                             ^^
>                                                     Non greedy toggle
>                                                     here?
> 
> Should result in:
> 
> " test "
> 
> Any hints?

I am not aware of a general solution, but you can explicitly defeat the
greediness like in:
	s/\/\*[^*]*\*\///g
so  '.' was replaced with '[^*]' which matches one value less. While
not a foolproof solution, it should work most of the time - it fails
if a non-terminating '*' is embedded in the comment (and if you are
trying to remove comments then you still have problems with multiline
ones).

Well, worth at least $.01?

Note that you missed on '/' at the end of the pattern...

--
Eyal Lebedinsky (eyal at eyal.emu.id.au) <http://samba.org/eyal/>