The overriding principle of the regex engine is that it searches for the left-most possible match of the regex. And the left-most possible match for your regex is the empty string (zero digits) at the start of the string.

If you don't want that to happen, use the + quantifier instead (one or more matches).

Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed

In reply to Re: Search operator and * quantifier by moritz
in thread Search operator and * quantifier by Anonymous Monk

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