Why is that, tye? There's no reason to make the + non-greedy. There's no way for [^=] to match an =. Here's a benchmark: 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Benchmark 'timethese';
$short = "abcdefg";
$long = $short x 100;
timethese(-5, {
  japhyS => q{ "$short=123" =~ /[^=]+=/ },
  tyeS => q{ "$short=123" =~ /[^=]+?=/ },
  japhyL => q{ "$long=123" =~ /[^=]+=/ },
  tyeL => q{ "$long=123" =~ /[^=]+?=/ },
});
__END__
Benchmark: running japhyL, japhyS, tyeL, tyeS,
  each for at least 5 CPU seconds...
 japhyL:  5803.60/s (n=29018)
   tyeL:  1785.83/s (n=8947)
 japhyS:  30179.50/s (n=157537)
   tyeS:  26449.44/s (n=141240)

[download]
It gets worse for longer strings.

$_="goto+F.print+chop;\n=yhpaj";F1:eval

In reply to RE: (tye)Re: Regular expression to match an A=B type string needs help in storing matched parts of string by japhy
in thread Regular expression to match an A=B type string needs help in storing matched parts of string by princepawn

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