Regular expression to replace shortest match

Question

my string is like this sfdfdsfdsfstart112matlab2336endgfdgdfgkknfkgstart558899enddfdsfd

how can we replace part of a string such a way that the result will be

sfdfdsfdsfgfdgdfgkknfkgdfdsfd

i.e bolded content need to be removed.

Answer 1

You need to use non-greedy matching:

start.*?end

Answer 2

Use replacement function with this regex /start.+?end/g which will match the bold parts of your string. The g part of the regex means globally, and might need to be implemented differently depending on the language you use.

The key here is to use ? which turns on un-greedy matching. That means the match consumes the minimum amount of characters rather than the maximum, so will match from the start to the next rather than the last end

Answer 3

start[1-9]+end

if you need to have numbers between words