Example: $ echo qwerty | egrep -o 'we|wert' wert $ echo qwerty | egrep -o 'wert|we' wert
The same in Javascript: /we|wert/.exec('qwerty') ["we"] /wert|we/.exec('qwerty') ["wert"] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2394931/regex-is-behaving-lazy-should-be-greedy $ egrep --version grep (GNU grep) 2.25 -- Segmentation fault