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Difference between .? and . for regex
I was reading this question, and noticed that many of the regular expressions in the answers used .*? to match intermediate text, rather than just .*.
To my mind, using .* will match any character zero or more times. Adding ? would be superfluous, as it would just modify "zero or more" to "zero or more once, or nothing" (in other words, "zero or more, or zero").
Does .*? represent a special regex sequence, or is it just an odd way to write .* with more characters?