By default, regular expression matching is greedy, which means they try to match as many matches as possible in a given string.
Lets see an example considering HTML snippet - <p>Hello</p><span>Awesome</span><p>World</p>. Our task is to extract first p tag. i.e pattern matching should return <p>Hello</p>.
Immediate solution is to write regex - /<p>.*<\/p>/. But it would match the whole string.
Greedy
The reason it matches whole string is because * (and also +) is greedy. That is, the star causes the regex engine to repeat the preceding literal as often as possible. So, the engine will repeat the dot as many times as it can. The dot matches H, then e and so on till the matched string is <p>Hello</p><span>Awesome</span><p>World</. The dot again matches next character p and moves on to next character which is >. The dot matches it again and the engine continues repeating the dot. The dot will match all remaining characters in the string. The dot fails when the engine has reached the void after the end of the string. At this point the regex engine continue matching with the next token: <.
So far, <p>.* has matched <p>Hello</p><span>Awesome</span><p>World</p> and the engine has arrived at the end of the string where < cannot match. This is where the engine will start backtrack. It will reduce the repetition of the star by one and then continue trying the remainder of the regex.
So the match of .* is reduced to <p>Hello</p><span>Awesome</span><p>World</p. The next token in the regex is still <. But now the next character in the string is the last p. This cannot match, causing the engine to backtrack further. So the engine continues backtracking until the match of .* is reduced to <p>Hello</p><span>Awesome</span><p>World. Now, < can match the next character in the string. This process continues until all literals of regex is matched against the string thus matching the whole string. But this is not what we need.
Non-greedy or ** Laziness**
The fix to this problem is to make the star lazy instead of greedy. You can do that by putting a question mark(?) after the star in the regex - /<p>.*?<\/p>/. Let's have another look on how the regex engine matches the string with lazy star.
<p> will match starting <p> of the string. Next regex literal is . followed with lazy star. This tells the regex engine to repeat the dot as few times as possible. So the engine matches the dot with H and the engine continues with matching < with e. This fails causing regex engine to backtrack. But this time, the backtracking will force the lazy star to expand repetition rather than reduce its reach. So the match of .*? is expanded to He. Backtrack and matching will continue till lazy star matches Hello. Now the next literal is < matching against next character of string which is <. It succeeds and the matching continues until the regex engine stops after matching <p>Hello</p>.
Cool stuff :)
Tool used for regex matching - https://regex101.com/