Be sure to see this meditation for better understanding of how it's supposed to (and does) work.

In your example, it did match as many times as possible: once. Matching ab instead of a would not be matching more times, just more characters.

We're not really tightening our belts, it just feels that way because we're getting fatter.

In reply to Re: Greedy regexp matching: differences between man page and implementation? by Roy Johnson
in thread Greedy regexp matching: differences between man page and implementation? by stijnvs

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