sed regular expression matching more than intended

Question

This,

echo 'memory-type="3" reference-number="1" crc="0"' | sed 's/reference-number=".*"//g'

returns:

memory-type="3" 

I want:

memory-type="3" crc="0"

What's the reg-ex to accomplish this?

White-space isn't important in the final result

Answer 1

Your problem is that .* matches the longest possible string; in your case:

memory-type="3" reference-number="1" crc="0"
                                  ↑-------↑

You want it to match only the 1.  The simplest way to do this is to match, not any number of any character, but any number of any character except for quote:

$ echo 'memory-type="3" reference-number="1" crc="0"' | sed 's/reference-number="[^"]*"//g'
memory-type="3"  crc="0"