Greedy qualifiers

By default, *, +, and ? qualifiers are all greedy - they match as much text as possible.

An example of greedy behavior:

In [1]: import re

In [2]: line = '<text line> some text>'

In [3]: match = re.search('<.*>', line)

In [4]: match.group()
Out[4]: '<text line> some text>'

In this case, expression captured maximum possible piece of symbols contained in <>. If greedy behavior need to be disabled, just add a question mark after the repetition symbols:

In [5]: line = '<text line> some text>'

In [6]: match = re.search('<.*?>', line)

In [7]: match.group()
Out[7]: '<text line>'

But greed is often useful. For example, without turning off greed of the last plus, expression \d+\s+\S+ describes line:

In [8]: line = '1500     aab1.a1a1.a5d3    FastEthernet0/1'

In [9]: re.search('\d+\s+\S+', line).group()
Out[9]: '1500     aab1.a1a1.a5d3'

Symbol \S denotes everything except whitespace characters. Therefore, expression \S+ with greedy repetition symbol describes maximum long string until the first whitespace character. In this case up to the first space.

If greed is disabled, the result is:

In [10]: re.search('\d+\s+\S+?', line).group()
Out[10]: '1500     a'