Ignoring, for the moment, the wisdom of using the proper tool (which is generally not a regex) for parsing HTML...

The issue here is not greediness. The issue is the misuse of ".*". Making the "*" non-greedy is just a band-aid which masks the fact that ".*" says "match any number of any characters", when what you actually mean is "match any number of any non-double quote characters". The correct way to write that regex is: 

$moo =~ m/src="([^"]*)"/;

[download]

The non-greedy qualifier does have its legitimate uses, generally in cases where your target is terminated by a sequence of multiple characters. In cases where a negated character class can do the job, though, the character class will almost always be the better option.

In reply to Re^2: lovely regexs by dsheroh
in thread lovely regexs by sv123

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