What is the significance of the "greedy" nature of regular expressions in PHP, and how can it affect search results?

The "greedy" nature of regular expressions in PHP means that they will match as much as possible in a given string. This can lead to unexpected results when searching for patterns in text, as the regex may match more than intended. To solve this issue, you can use the "lazy" quantifier "?" to make the regex match as little as possible. 

$text = "This is a <b>bold</b> statement.";
$pattern = '/<b>(.*?)<\/b>/';
preg_match($pattern, $text, $matches);
echo $matches[1]; // Output: bold

Keywords

regular expressions greedy PHP search results significance

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