http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=23335


in reply to RE: RE: Quantifiers in regular expressions
in thread Quantifiers in regular expressions

Yeah, AM escapes the wrong chars. Let's put it right. If you say:
$string =~ /<.*>(.*)<\/.*>/;
on a string "<foo>...</foo><bar>...</bar>" you get everything between "<foo>" and "</bar>", because the "*" modifier is "greedy", which means it tries to match as much as possible. A "." in a regex matches anything, so ".*" matches until the end of the string. Then the rest of the regex is evaluated, done by backtracking (the regex machine is now at the end of the string and goes back one by one until it finds a match). I hope this was correct.

Update:
Damn HTML escaping :) I fixed it, so the strings actually show up.