Non-Greedy Regular Expression Matching

This applies to Ruby, and many other languages too (eg. Perl), just that I keep forgetting it. In order to have non-greedy matching enabled, append the question mark after the quantifiers, ie.

* (0 or more) greedy matching
+ (1 or more) greedy matching
*? (0 or more) non-greedy matching
+? (1 or more) non-greedy matching

For vim, the syntax is slightly more convoluted, so it’s important to put a note here for my own reminder:

* (0 or more) greedy matching
\+ (1 or more) greedy matching
\{-} (0 or more) non-greedy matching
\{-n,} (at least n) non-greedy matching

There’s no direct ‘(1 or more) non-greedy matching’ in vim, but the ‘at least n’ operation should be the equivalent. For vim, these should normally be default and independent of whether if the ‘very magic’ or ‘very nomagic’ mode is set. See help in pattern.txt, for more pattern matching details.