What is the RegEx equivalent of ".-" in Lua's pattern matching?

Question

I'm porting some Lua code to JS and I haven't worked with Lua so far. There's the Lua pattern "^([^aeiouàèéêíòóôúïü]*)(.-)$" and I found the following explanation for the hyphen here:

- Match the previous character (or class) zero or more times, as few times as possible.

I'm trying to figure out what the equivalent as a regular expression would be. Also I don't understand why this is needed in the first place - wouldn't ending in (.*)$ suffice?

Answer 1

In Java, .- is actually equivalent of [\s\S]*? or (?s).*?, or - to play it safe - (?s:.*?), because . in Lua patterns matches any char (including line break chars) and - is the lazy (non-greedy) quantifier that matches 0 or more chars, i.e. *? in regular NFA regex.

See Lua patterns:

. all characters

And then

The `+´ modifier matches one or more characters of the original class. It will always get the longest sequence that matches the pattern.

The modifier `*´ is similar to `+´, but it also accepts zero occurrences of characters of the class...

Like `*´, the modifier `-´ also matches zero or more occurrences of characters of the original class. However, instead of matching the longest sequence, it matches the shortest one.