How do I perform a non-greedy (minimal) match in Vim search?

Explanation

How it works

In most regex engines, *? or +? make quantifiers non-greedy (matching as little as possible). Vim uses a different syntax: \{-} is the non-greedy equivalent of *.

Here is the comparison:

• .* matches as many characters as possible (greedy)
• .\{-} matches as few characters as possible (non-greedy)
• .\{-1,} is the non-greedy version of .\+ (one or more, minimal)
• .\{-,3} matches zero to three characters, preferring fewer

The \{-} quantifier is essential when you want to match the shortest possible string between two delimiters.

Example

Consider this HTML line:

<div class="header">Title</div><div class="content">Body</div>

With a greedy search:

/<div.*<\/div>

This matches the entire line from the first <div to the last </div>, capturing everything.

With a non-greedy search:

/<div.\{-}<\/div>

This matches only <div class="header">Title</div> -- the shortest possible match.

Another practical example is extracting quoted strings. Given:

name = "Alice", city = "Boston"

• /".*" greedily matches "Alice", city = "Boston" (first quote to last quote)
• /".\{-}" matches just "Alice" (first quote to nearest closing quote)

In very magic mode (\v), the syntax is .{-} without the extra backslash:

/\v".{-}"