I have been having trouble using the regular expression search function.
I would like to be able to use the "lazy star" ability of regexp to find the smallest match on a line.
eg. regexp: <a.*?>
from the line: <a href="test.html">this is an <b>example</b></a>
should give: <a href="test.html">
but gives error "Failed to compile Regular Expression".

Also *+ is not understood.

This bug posted by richard.

What should '.*?' do exactly? As far as I understand it, '.*' means any character (the .) any number of times (0 or more of the character before--this is the *). Tacking a ? (0 or 1 match of the character before (which in this case is a character that means 0 or more) on to the end does nothing useful...

I should probably continue to say that according to your example, you should be able to use:
'<a.*>' to find apparently in this case the largest block with '<a' at the beginning and '>' at the end. How would the '?' help here?

The lazy star is a Perl (and other regexps) feature; the normal context for regexp is to find the largest match it can, which is what CE is doing. The lazy star is an instruction to the regexp compiler to instead match the shortest string it can.

It would appear that this is not a feature coded into this particular regexp library (from what I understand from "Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd Ed.", the author of this library used an unusual hybrid which gave all round good performance, but lacked in some features like lazy star)

I can't remember off hand what *+ would do, but if you wanted to find 1 or more * symbols, you'd need to escape it first.

Changing to an enhancement as this is not a bug simply a limitation of the regex lib used.

We may at some point update to a more featured lib.