My rule of thumb for .* versus .*? is that the former is for grabbing everything after a certain point (I can't be bothered with $') and the latter for grabbing data between 2 points.

I'd say that .*? is most often useful when grabbing things between two points and the second point is defined by a string of more than one character. If the right hand side can be recognized by a single character I'd suggest a negated character class instead. For example, I'd almost alway prefer using /[^x]*/ to using /.*?x/ because the former is explicit in its exclusion of x's. :-)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";