Understanding Regular Expressions says 
Items governed by * (and *?) are optional not only once,
but repeatedly forever (well, to be pedantic, Perl currently
has an internal limit of 32K repeats for parenthetical items).

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

In reply to Re: Is there a hard limit on + in a regex? by Roy Johnson
in thread Is there a hard limit on + in a regex? by samtregar

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