You're very welcome. It may seem a bit churlish to bring this up after your gracious thanks, but it dawned on me that the subject of the OP was familiar, and I was right: Re^3: Substitution don't work discusses a similar problem. Updates 2 & 3 there give contrasting examples of  .* versus  .*? (greedy versus lazy) behavior. (Also see the discussion there of the effect of the  /s regex modifier on the behavior of the  . (dot) metacharacter when matching against a multi-line string.)

These comments are not intended to give you a hard time, but to suggest that the advice of the humble Monks will be of more value to you the more attention you pay it.

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

In reply to Re^3: How to modify my regex? by AnomalousMonk
in thread How to modify my regex? by OldChamp

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