Regex to first occurrence only?

Question

Let\'s say I have the following string:

this is a test for the sake of testing. this is only a test. The end.

and I want to se

Answer 1

The regex is greedy meaning it will capture as many characters as it can which fall into the .* match. To make it non-greedy try:

this(.*?)test

The ? modifier will make it capture as few characters as possible in the match.