I was messing around with patterns and trying to parse a string for some information.

local str = "<water:100>     askdjkl< << <<wood:2> <string:3"

how would I extract only '<water:100>', '<wood:2>', and '<string:3' from this string?

currently:

for item in str:gmatch("<.->") do
		print(item)
	end

The problem is that I can't get the last item because the '>' is supposed to be optional at the end of the string only. I've tried messing around with anchors and failed. Another thing I noticed is that for "wood" I get "< << <<wood:2>" even though I used .- to match the shortest sequence possible.