For a regular expression to match at all, it does not matter whether the regex engine or the regex subexpressions are greedy or nongreedy. Both will give up or match more if that's neccessary to make the whole match succeed. If you care about how the regular expression matches, greedyness becomes an issue:

for (<DATA>) {
    print "Greedy: $1/$2\n";
        if /^(a+)(a+)$/;
    print "Non-greedy: $1/$2\n";
        if /^(a+?)(a+)$/;
};

[download]

In reply to Re: Is greediness irrelevant when matching whole lines? by Corion
in thread Is greediness irrelevant when matching whole lines? by loris

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.