Regex match the first appearance of a word

Question

Sorry. I rephased the example as below, how can I match number ( 1 ) right after the first appearance of mary in the following paragraph ( all the three groups are mandatory in my case):

Regex.Match("Do you know 3453 **Mary** has a little lamb 1 and Mary likes dancing 2."
, @"(Do).*(Mary).*(\d)");

Currently It matches the second Mary , as a result, the third group captured 2 instead of 1

Answer 1

Use .*? instead of .* :

Regex.Match("Do you know **Mary** has a little lamb 1 and Mary likes dancing 2.",
  @"(Do).*?(Mary).*?(\d)");

.* matches the longest substring possible (greedy), while .*? matches the shortest (lazy). In your example, the first .* included the first Mary because it matches as many characters as possible.