The stuff after trailing slashes in regexps

[Boofo]

What does the i do in siU?

[filburt1]

Case-insensitive (stupid JS-based vB code generator...)

[Logician]

Today at 05:16 AM filburt1 said this in Post #1
I still can't figure out what U does (vB uses //siU everywhere), but those five are the common ones.

U specifies "greediness". Roughly that is whether search returns the largest matched pair or the smallest, if there are more than 1 matches.

[filburt1]

But isn't .? used for that (rather than .*)?

[Logician]

Say you have this text:

aaaaa
[bbb]
ccccccccccccc
[bbb]
dddddddddddd
[/bbb]
eeeeeeeee
[/bbb]
ffffffffffff

and you are trying to match chars between [bbb] tags. Would your regular expression return:

dddddddddddd

or:

ccccccccccccc
[bbb]
dddddddddddd
[/bbb]
eeeeeeeee

that is what greediness parameter specifies.

[filburt1]

I know what it means, I mean that isn't that what the ? operator is used for rather than the * operator?