"Scott Marlowe" <scott.marlowe@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > ...Which is not surprising. It's greedy. So, I turn off the greediness > of the first + with a ? and then I get this > select substring (notes from E'LONG DB QUERY.+?time: [0-9]+.[0-9]+') > from table where id=1; > LONG DB QUERY (db1, 4.9376289844513): UPDATE force_session SET > last_used_timestamp = 'now'::timestamp WHERE orgid = 15723 AND > session_id = 'f5ca5ec95965e8ac99ec9bc31eca84c6New session created > time: 5.0 > Now, I'm pretty sure that with the [0-9]+.[0-9]+ I should be getting > 5.03999090194 at the end. You're getting bit by the fact that the initial non-greedy quantifier makes the entire regex non-greedy --- see rules in section 9.7.3.5: http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/functions-matching.html#POSIX-MATCHING-RULES If you know that there will always be something after the first time value, you could do something like E'(LONG DB QUERY.+?time: [0-9]+\\.[0-9]+)[^0-9]' to force the issue about how much the second and third quantifiers match. regards, tom lane
