捕获两个单词之间的字符串，但只有第一次

Question

I have string like:

 text = "Why do Humans need to eat food? Humans eat food to survive."

I want to capture everything between Human and food but only 1st time.

Expected Output

Humans need to eat food

My Regex:

p =r'(\bHumans?\b.*?\bFoods?\b)'

Python Code:

re.findall(p, text, re.I|re.M|re.DOTALL)

The code correctly captures the string between Human and Food but it doesn't stops at 1st capture.

Research :

I have read that to make it non-greedy I need to put ? but I am unable to figure out where I should keep it to make it non-greedy. All other permutation and combination I tried I can't stopped it at 1st match.

Update

I am writing a lot of regexes to capture various other entities like this and parsing them in one shot and hence I can't change my re.findall logic.

Answer 1

Use search instead of findall :

import re
text = "Why do Humans need to eat food? Humans eat food to survive."
p =r'(\bHumans?\b.*?\bFoods?\b)'
res = re.search(p, text, re.I|re.M|re.DOTALL)
print(res.groups())

Output:

('Humans need to eat food',)

Or add .* at the end of the regex:

import re
text = "Why do Humans need to eat food? Humans eat food to survive."
p =r'(\bHumans?\b.*?\bFoods?\b).*'
#                      here ___^^
res = re.findall(p, text, re.I|re.M|re.DOTALL)
print(res)

Answer 2

For finding the first match only, Toto's answer is best but as you said you need to use findall only, you can just append .* at the end of your regex to match remaining text which won't result in any matches further.

(\bHumans?\b.*?\bFoods?\b).*
                          ^^ This eats remaining part of your text due to which there won't be any further matches.

Demo

Sample Python codes,

import re

text = "Why do Humans need to eat food? Humans eat food to survive."
p =r'(\bHumans?\b.*?\bFoods?\b).*'
print(re.findall(p, text, re.I|re.M|re.DOTALL))

Prints,

['Humans need to eat food']

Answer 3

Try this:

>>> import re
>>> text = "Why do Humans need to eat food? Humans eat food to survive."
>>> re.search(r'Humans.*?food', text).group() # you want the all powerful non-greedy '?' :)
'Humans need to eat food'