Regex not matching an expression

Question

Hello, I've just started using regular expressions and I have a question: I've wanted to create a regex which matches all strings starting with <!-- and possibly ending with -->, with the exception that the string --> cannot appear in the middle of the matching text. To do this, I wrote the following pattern:
\Q<!--\E[!(\Q-->\E)]*(\Q-->\E)?I'm quite aware that it's a bad idea not telling the regex what to match, but rather what not to match, as it is very vague and probably inefficient, however, I did expect this to work nonetheless, which it just doesn't. It does match the string "<!--" but no further (i.e, not "<!-- a"). What did I get wrong? (There's probably a much better way to do this, however, as I said, I'm a regex newbie).
thanks,
laginimaineb.

Answer 1

The closes I got was:
"\\Q<!--\\E[^(\\Q-->\\E)]*(?:(\\Q-->\\E)?+)"Which seemed to work well until I tried the last little sample in the below code:
package net.luke;
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
public class RegexEr {
      * @param args
     public static void main(String[] args) {
          //Starts with <!--, then has any characters except --> 0 or more times, and ends with --> 0 or 1 times.
          String pattern = "\\Q<!--\\E[^(\\Q-->\\E)]*(?:(\\Q-->\\E)?+)";
          String[] searches = new String[] {
                    "<!--", "<!-- Hey", "<!-- Hey \n\rThere",
                    "Hey There <!-- You dog --> you.", "Huh <!-- What did --> you say -->?",
                    "I <!-- just need --> to <!-- make up --> some strings.",
                    "But <!-- 123--456>7?-->"};
          Pattern p = Pattern.compile(pattern);
          Matcher m;
          for (int i = 0; i < searches.length; i++) {
               m = p.matcher(searches);
               while (m.find()) {
                    System.out.println(m.group());
Results: <!--
<!-- Hey
<!-- Hey
There
<!-- You dog -->
<!-- What did -->
<!-- just need -->
<!-- make up -->
<!-- 123
-- Edit --
Which, when I clean it up doesn't turn out much different that yours:"\\Q<!--\\E[^(\\Q-->\\E)]*(\\Q-->\\E)?"Edited by: stevejluke on Jul 23, 2008 8:00 PM