Regular Expression, match characters between { }

Question

I'm trying to find text that contains a < or > between { }. This is within HTML and I'm having trouble getting it to be "ungreedy".

So I want to find text that matches these strings:

{test > 3}
{testing >= 3 : comment}
{example < 4}

I've tried a number of regular expressions, but the all seem to continue past the closing } and including HTML that has < or >. For example, I tried this regex

{.*?(<|>).*?}

but that ends up matching text like this:

{if true}<b>testing</b>{/if}

It seems pretty simple, any text between { } that contain < or >.

Answer 1

This should do the trick:

{[^}]*(<|>).*}

Answer 2

{[^}]*?(<|>)[^{]*?}

Try that. Note that I replaced the .s with a character class that means everything except the left/right curly braces.

Answer 3

Have you tried using the Ungreedy (U) switch?

Answer 4

An even more efficient regex (because there is no non-greedy matching):

'#{[^}<>]*[<>]+[^}]*}#'

The reason there aren't brackets in the third character class is so that it matches strings with more than one > (such as {foo <> bar}...