Ordinarily a regex will "greedily" try to match the longest possible string

No. 

# Matches 2 chars at pos 0, not 6 chars at pos 2.
"acabbbbc" =~ /ab*c/

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Greediness applies to individual regex atoms, causing those to match as much as possible at the current position.

In reply to Re^2: Modification of a read-only value attempted by ikegami
in thread Modification of a read-only value attempted by josthi

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