How do I find the shortest overlapping match using regular expressions?

Question

I\'m still relatively new to regex. I\'m trying to find the shortest string of text that matches a particular pattern, but am having trouble if the shortest pattern is a sub

Answer 1

The regex engine starts searching from the beginning of the string till it finds a match and then exits. Thus if it finds a match before it even considers the smaller one, there is no way for you to force it to consider later matches in the same run - you will have to rerun the regex on substrings.

Setting the global flag and choosing the shortest matched string won't help as it is evident from your example - the shorter match might be a substring of another match (or partly included in it). I believe you will have to start subsequent searches from (1 + index of previous match) and go on like that.