While attempting to do a substitution of word characters “[a-zA-Z0-9_]” in a string, I noticed using a “\w*” pattern lead to 2 matches:
- One for the string
- Another for the void at the end of the string
For instance: see: https://regex101.com/r/ptz8Cm/1
The explanation is at: http://www.regular-expressions.info/zerolength.html
In short, we should use “\w+” instead of “\w*” so that zero-length matches are avoided.
Note: if you make the quantifier lazy as in https://regex101.com/r/ptz8Cm/2 then you have 3 matches.
