Are there differences between "/\((.*)\)/" and "/\(([^\)]*)\)/"?

Are there differences开发者_开发问答 between /\((.*)\)/ and /\(([^\)]*)\)/?

In particular, would the second regular expression match a line ending, while the first one would not?

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Yes, AFAIK the dot does not match newlines in most regex engines without a modifier.

EDIT: Apparently JS doesn't even have that option. I personally think negated character classes are the way to go; I barely use the dot in regex.

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Another important difference is that the dot will match ). Suppose you're you're trying to match the first parenthetical expression in

blah blah (foo) blah blah (bar)

The regex /\(.*\)/ will match (foo) blah blah (bar) because the * is greedy. You can fix that by using a reluctant quantifier instead - /\(.*?\)/ - but what if you want to match the last one? You know it's the last thing in the string, so you just add the end-of-string anchor - /\(.*?\)$/ - but now it's back to matching (foo) blah blah (bar) again. Only the negated character class will give you what you want in this case: /\([^)]*\)$/.