Re: Why is this regex greedy?

The regex engine prefers leftmost, longest matches. Nothing in your regex prevents it from matching everything between the first slash and the end of line.

Comment on Re: Why is this regex greedy?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Why is this regex greedy? by pbeckingham (Parson) on Jul 02, 2004 at 20:34 UTC
So it is not treating that `.+?` the way I expected? Even though there are more-minimal matches? I guess leftmost-longest trumps non-greedy.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Why is this regex greedy? by duff (Parson) on Jul 02, 2004 at 20:55 UTC
Right and right. I don't understand why people expect non-greedy matching to actually mean "globally shortest match". Perhaps it's in the language we use. Just keep the left-to-rightness as the most prominent feature of your mental model of how perl's RE engine works and you shouldn't go wrong though. duff	[reply]