== Why is this an issue?

Using reluctant quantifiers (also known as lazy or non-greedy quantifiers) in patterns can often lead to needless backtracking, making the regex needlessly inefficient and potentially vulnerable to https://www.regular-expressions.info/catastrophic.html[catastrophic backtracking]. Particularly when using ``++.*?++`` or ``++.+?++`` to match anything up to some terminating character, it is usually a better idea to instead use a greedily or quantified negated character class containing the terminating character. For example ``++<.+?>++`` should be replaced with ``<[^>]*>`` or ``<[^>]+>``.


=== Noncompliant code example

[source,python]
----

r'<.+?>'
r'".*?"'
----


=== Compliant solution

[source,python]
----
r'<[^>]+>'
r'"[^"]*"'
----


=== Exceptions

This rule only applies in cases where the reluctant quantifier can easily be replaced with a negated character class. That means the repetition has to be terminated by a single character or character class. Patterns such as the following, where the alternatives without reluctant quantifiers are more complicated, are therefore not subject to this rule:


[source,python]
----
/<!--.*?-->/
-/\*.*?\*/-
----