While new to perlmonks im not new to perl, having used even bigperl on win95. Yet i still find it hard to understand regular expressions sometimes. below is a case that i would like some input about; 


my               $content1=''&#22 x';
                 $content1=~s/\&(\#\d*[^;\d]+)/\&$1/gs; 
print '1:'.$content1."\n"; 

my               $content2=''&#22 x';
                 $content2=~s/\&(\#\d*[^;]+)/\&$1/gs; 
print '2:'.$content2."\n";

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Result 
1:'&#22 x
2:'&#22 x

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I first wrote the content2 code, expecting \d* to be greedy, and was surprised to find it was not greedy enough. My fix is the content1 code, and i am happy that it works and i figured it out. But i still cant understand why the \d* in content2 was not greedy enough to capture all of the '39', instead taking the '9' to be NOT ';' . Can someone enlighten me please? 

This is perl 5, version 20, subversion 1 (v5.20.1) built for MSWin32-x
+86-multi-thread-64int
(with 1 registered patch, see perl -V for more detail)

Copyright 1987-2014, Larry Wall

Binary build 2000 [298557] provided by ActiveState http://www.ActiveSt
+ate.com
Built Oct 15 2014 22:10:49

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Now in all reality the &#22 shouldn't be there, this is from text that has been html encoded by the yahoo groups api and returned within a JSON content. the user did expect to see &#22 on the page and for some reason yahoo did not encode the & to & im just trying to work around it.

Thank you for any explanations

In reply to RE greedyness by huck

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