Hello guys,

I am learning greediness part of regular express, and read example as this,

To match text wrapped in double quotes in sentence <The name "McDonald's" is said "makudonarudo" in Japanese>

You need use "[^"]*" to avoid greediness, as following

$ sed 's/"[^"]*"/ /g' wk
The name is said in Japanese

I am a little confused on this, as I know, * means match ZERO or more preceding.
so basically although [^"] mean any character except ", with a * it should turn to match ANY character(s), which will unfortunately include " again,

but why the regex works?

But you just said preceding, meaning it will match any up until it finds a " again . Also, the g there means 'global', so it will replace every occurance of the matching expression.

Hmmm, I think I did not express my question clearly, let me clarify.

let's forget about greediness first, my question is about the regular express [^"]*

In the example above, [^"]* are used to match any characters except ", right?

But, I think it is wrong, * means match ZERO or more preceding

So I think [^"]* does no make sense, it can match "

It can't simply because it a char followed by *, will match the longest string possible, in this case everything up to the next ", or put another way...

a regex "[^"]*" would match "" or "some string" but the match terminates as soon as the second " is hit.