I thought that by default my Regex would exhibit the greedy behavior that I want, but it is not in the following code:
Regex keywords = new Regex(@"in|int|into|internal|interface");
var targets = keywords.ToString().Split('|');
foreach (string t in targets)
{
Match match = keywords.Match(t);
Console.WriteLine("Matched {0,-9} with {1}", t, match.Value);
}
Output:
Matched in with in
Matched int with in
Matched into with in
Matched internal with in
Matched interface with in
Now I realize that I could get it to work for this small example if I simply sorted the keywords by length descending, but
So my question is: Why is this being lazy and how do I fix it?
Laziness and greediness applies to quantifiers only (?
, *
, +
, {min,max}
). Alternations always match in order and try the first possible match.