Let's say I have the following string:
this is a test for the sake of testing. this is only a test. The end.
and I want to select this is a test and this is only a test. What in the world do I need to do?
The following Regex I tried yields a goofy result:
this(.*)test (I also wanted to capture what was between it)
returns this is a test for the sake of testing. this is only a test
It seems like this is probably something easy I'm forgetting.
The regex is greedy meaning it will capture as many characters as it can which fall into the .* match. To make it non-greedy try:
this(.*?)test
The ? modifier will make it capture as few characters as possible in the match.
* is a greedy quantifier. That means it matches as much as possible, i.e. what you are seeing. Depending on the specific language support for regex, you will need to find a non-greedy quantifier. Usually this is a trailing question mark, like this: *?. That means it will stop consuming letters as soon as the rest of the regex can be satisfied.
Andy E and Ipsquiggle have the right idea, but I want to point out that you might want to add a word boundary assertion, meaning you don't want to deal with words that have "this" or "test" in them-- only the words by themselves. In Perl and similar that's done with the "\b" marker.
As it is, this(.*?)test would match "thistles are the greatest", which you probably don't want.
The pattern you want is something like this: \bthis\b(.*?)\btest\b