Find shortest matches between two strings

Question

I have a large log file, and I want to extract a multi-line string between two strings: start and end.

The following is sample from the

Answer 1

This is tricky to do because by default, the re module does not look at overlapping matches. Newer versions of Python have a new regex module that allows for overlapping matches.

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex

You'd want to use something like

regex.findall(pattern, string, overlapped=True)

If you're stuck with Python 2.x or something else that doesn't have regex, it's still possible with some trickery. One brilliant person solved it here:

Python regex find all overlapping matches?

Once you have all possible overlapping (non-greedy, I imagine) matches, just determine which one is shortest, which should be easy.