Because without the space, you are capturing EVERYTHING (.*) INCLUDING spaces, up until the very last non-whitespace character in the string. Without the space, the regex doesn't know to stop at a space.

I always use \s+ in place of literal spaces. I find it makes the regex far easier to understand, and way less likely I'll overlook a literal space (which is exceptionally easy to do).

-stevieb

In reply to Re^3: need help with explaining the output by stevieb
in thread need help with explaining the output by perlynewby

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