I'm sorry to have confused you, but I was definitely not intending to imply that Java did better RE matching than Perl - I am certain, particularly after reading Mastering REs, that the opposite is true.

What I was trying to say (badly, apparently) was that the possessive quantifier + was a feature in the java RE engine which I liked better than its (?>) counterpart in Perl.

I hope that clears up any confusion you may have had. Thank you for your input, though, since I always like to see language comparisons (and find myself often treating Perl as the god of all languages).

update: Looking at this later, I realize that I have yet again said something other than what I mean, for which I feel greatly foolish.

The possessive quantifier +, is a feature which I see as potentially very convenient. The (?>) construct, for some simple cases, is less readable, IMHO, but cannot be ignored for more complex cases or the must-match-exactly-once case.

Didn't mean to imply any mine's-bigger-than-yours stuff, just a hey-lookit-this-nifty-feature thing.