how to select inner matches in lex

Hello,

am new to lex and I wanna take all the matches specific to a regular expression

for example in the following text :

/* text text

text 
text

text */

text text
/* text text text text text text

text text */

i wanna choose the two matches between /* and */

but lex matches the whole outer match and doen't return the two! I use this expression :

\/\*(.|\n)*\*\/

How to select inner matches instead of the whole outer one? thank you

From stackoverflow

• \/\*([^*]|\n|\*+[^*/])*\*+\/
  

  What's going on is that * is greedy -- it will match as long of a string as possible. The preceding expression treats the character * separately by ensuring that the regular expression can continue only as long as it is not followed by the character /. This is accomplished by having the interior units of the regular expression be one of

  • a character that's not *
  • a newline
  • a string of *s followed by a character that's not /

  At the end, there is a string of *s followed by a /. (Note: a previous version did not handle this case correctly. I really wish that flex had the *? operator.)

  martani_net : same result dude!

  martani_net : perfect, second version working, can u explain a little bit wots going on in that expression? thank you.

  martani_net : Ah now I get it, I used the *? operator because I usually works in PHP pretty well, why don't flex have it?? anyway thanx for the details also