Is the lazy version of the 'optional' quantifier ('??') ever useful in a regular expression?

Question

I cannot think of a situation where I'd want to use `??` in a regular expression, but maybe I'm not thinking hard enough.

Accepted Answer

Maybe a delimiter-separated list, and you don't want to match any terminating delimiter.

```
^((?:[^,]+,??)+),?$
```

That would capture `"a,b,c"` from `"a,b,c,"`, where as the non-lazy variant would include the comma in the capture-group.

Solution