Hi all, i am investigating multibyte char matching, and came across this code: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$search = "\x8C\x95";
$text1 = "Text 1 \x90\x56\x8C\x95\x93\xB9";
$text2 = "Text 2 \x94\x92\x8C\x8C\x95\x61";

$encoding = q{ # Shift-JIS encoding
[\x00-\x7F] # ASCII/JIS-Roman
| [\x81-\x9F\xE0-\xFC][\x40-\x7E\x80-\xFC] # JIS X 0208:1997
| [\xA0-\xDF] # Half-width katakana
};
print "First attempt -- no anchoring\n";
print " Matched Text1\n" if $text1 =~ /$search/o;
print " Matched Text2\n" if $text2 =~ /$search/o;
print "Second attempt -- anchoring\n";
print " Matched Text1\n" if $text1 =~ /^ (?:$encoding)*? $search/osx;
print " Matched Text2\n" if $text2 =~ /^ (?:$encoding)*? $search/osx;

[download]
What i don't understand are these lines like: 
print " Matched Text1\n" if $text1 =~ /^ (?:$encoding)*? $search/osx;

[download]
Can anyone help me out and explain, what they do...especially (?:$encoding)*? . 10x, Deda

In reply to regex question by Deda

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.