meaning of (\/?) in regex / is (\w+)([^>]*?) a redundancy?

Posted by thomas on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by thomas
Published on 2013-07-03T16:40:13Z Indexed on 2013/07/03 17:05 UTC
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regex

this regular expression should match an html start tag, I think.

var results = html.match(/<(\/?)(\w+)([^>]*?)>/);

I see it should first capture the <, but then I am confused what this capture (\/?) accomplishes. Am I correct in reasoning that the ([^>]*?)> searches for every character except > >= 0 times? If so, why is the (\w+) capture necessary? Doesn't it fall within the purview of [^>]*?

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