Dear Monks,

I am trying to do pattern matching, but can’t get the results I am looking for. Here is a very reduced example of what I am trying to do:

My search string is The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, and I am trying to match the lazy dog, but my problem is that I only have limited information about the snipped that I am interested in; I only know the first word (the) and the last word (dog). I tried to accomplish this with a simple lazy regular expression: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $string = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
$string =~ /(the .*? dog)/i;
print "Match: '", $1, "'";

[download]

But this gives me 

Match: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'

[download]

instead of the desired 

Match: 'the lazy dog'

[download]

Is there an elegant way of matching in the ‘laziest’ way (in the sense that a three-word match is lazier than matching the whole string)?

Thank you for you help,

Benedikt

In reply to Pattern matching: Lazy vs. greedy by false_friend

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