Matching wrong pattern in regular expressions in java

Question

I am trying to capture just 1 word before the equals sign but what is happening is that it is capturing everything before the equal sign. Here is my code:

 public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    String text      = "This is = an equal sign";

    Pattern p  = Pattern.compile(" (.*?)=");
    Matcher matcher  = p.matcher(text);  
    if (matcher.find())
    {
         System.out.println("Match: " + matcher.group(0));
    }
}

This is the output that I got:

Match: This is =

Answer 1

Try below code:

class Ideone
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    String text      = "This is = an equal sign";

    Pattern p  = Pattern.compile("(\\w+)\\s?=");
    Matcher matcher  = p.matcher(text);  
    if (matcher.find())
    {
         System.out.println("Match: " + matcher.group(1));
    }
}
}

Output : Match: is