In Friedls book Mastering Regular Expressions this technique is called loop unrolling. Your second example is bad because of the nested * - Perl should warn you about them. I would write it as: 
    m{<div\s+class\s*=\s*"blockqte"\s*>((?:[^<]+|</?s)*)</div>}

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-- Abigail

In reply to Re: Help on using alternation grouping star versus dot star. by Abigail
in thread Help on using alternation grouping star versus dot star. by Anonymous Monk

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