Re^2: Pattern matching: Lazy vs. greedy

Hello Athanasius, Thank you for your answer. I tried something like

my  @matches = $string =~ /(the .*? dog)/gi;
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before, which is without the (?= before the regex and the ) after it. This didn’t get me anywhere. I thought I was familiar with look-around assertions, but to be honest, I don’t get what the (?=) is doing here. I thought it is only used as a modification to something preceding it. I consulted http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#Extended-Patterns but could not find why the two variants give different results. Could you explain that to me?

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Re^3: Pattern matching: Lazy vs. greedy by choroba (Cardinal) on Mar 30, 2015 at 12:51 UTC
The point of using `/(?=(the .? dog))/gi` here is that look around assertions are zero length, i.e. after they match at position P, the next match is not searched at their end, but at the position P + 1, so you can find overlapping* matches, as well. لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Pattern matching: Lazy vs. greedy by false_friend (Novice) on Mar 30, 2015 at 17:47 UTC
Thank you. Now I got it.	[reply]