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

I do not think that this task can be accomplished by a single regular expression. I have no proof that this is the case, but there are quite a lot of things that can't be done with regexes and I expected this problem to be one of them. Some good examples of the limitations of regexes are given in this blog post.