I have url like this domain/news-343dds-this-is-test

I want to extract news id 343dds, so I tried to use regex

Here is the regex I used /news-(.+)-/

But the result is like this 343dds-this-is. I only want get the 343dds.

I have url like this domain./news-343dds-this-is-test

I want to extract news id 343dds, so I tried to use regex

Here is the regex I used /news-(.+)-/

But the result is like this 343dds-this-is. I only want get the 343dds.

• javascript
• regex

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2 Answers 2

Sorted by: Reset to default 6

The (.+) is being greedy and matching the rest of the input. Change it to (.+?) to make it not greedy.

Jeremy Hanlon's solution obviously works but is not the most remended one.

You had better using ([^-]+).

Even if it probably doesn't matter in simple cases such as this SO question, the lazy quantifier +? has the inconvenient that the number of steps is proportional to the size of the searched part, so it may widely impact performance.
This is clearly explained here.

Example:

• (.+?) needs 22 steps for the given 343dds key
• (.+?) needs 68 steps for a longer key like thisIsASignificativelyLongKey
• ([^-]+) needs 12 steps only for any key