It is a bug, but I'm not sure what's causing it. Running it through the debugger, when it finally gets to the (.+) part, it seems to be under the impression that it can only match one character. Changing the first half of the regex fixes this problem, but the fact is the bug remains.

Update: By the way, I came up with a way to use split() for this kind of problem -- splitting on a pattern unless you're inside quotes (or the like). It's ugly, and probably not fit for production, but here it is: 

while (<DATA>) {
  chomp;
  my $q = 0;

  # documented for the faint of heart
  my @fields = split m{
    '                # if we match a '
    (?{ $q = !$q })  # toggle $q
    (?!)             # and fail (don't split here)
   |                 # OR
    XX               # if we match XX
    (?(?{$q})        # and $q is true
      (?!)           # fail (don't split here)
    )                # otherwise it succeeds and splits
  }x;
  print "[", join("][", @fields), "]\n";
}

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Try that on your data. It's sick.
Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

In reply to Re: This regex seems to have splattered non-greedy everywhere by japhy
in thread This regex seems to have splattered non-greedy everywhere by fizbin

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