Parsing valid parent directories with regex

Question

Given the string a/b/c/d which represents a fully-qualified sub-directory I would like to generate a series of strings for each step up the parent tree, i.e.

Answer 1

Yes, it's possible:

/([^\/]*)\//

So basically it replaces your .*? with [^/]*, and it does not have to be non-greedy. Since / is a special character in your case, you will have to escape it, like so: [^\/]*.