Well, I guess you're right, if you'd rather have a successful (blank) pattern match than a failed match. And I guess the web page could concievably contain a blank entry, so that makes sense.

But in the original context, we're only trying to match one record anyway, so if the match fails then $1 will contain '', and if you use .*? and the match succeeds then $1 will contain '', so I'm not sure it makes any difference. ;)

andy.