Re^2: Match only last occurrence (left-most then longest)

Actually, that doesn't work. The regex engine finds the first match of "text: \d{3}" and then tries to match ".*?" anti-greedily but still matches .*? before it would backtrack and try matching the second match. Anti-greediness doesn't trump "left-most first". It only trumps "longest first".

I think the simplest approach is:

my $match = ( /text: ([0-9]{3})/g )[-1];
[download]

But if you want to have the regex enforce the "last" part, then you have to get more complicated:

my( $match ) = /text: ([0-9]{3})(?:(?!text: [0-9]{3}).)*$/s;
[download]

- tye

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Re^3: Match only last occurrence (left-most then longest) by sotona (Scribe) on May 31, 2016 at 14:52 UTC
That's it! I didn't figure out I have to repeat the pattern to match exactly the last occurrence. Thanks a lot! Sapienti sat.	[reply]
Re^3: Match only last occurrence (left-most then longest) by hippo (Archbishop) on May 31, 2016 at 15:08 UTC
Anti-greediness doesn't trump "left-most first". It only trumps "longest first". How right you are - thanks for the spot and the correction.	[reply]