Untrue! Please try it and I think you'll see that 1000 is indeed matched. Perl's + modifer is greedy, meaning it will match as much as it can. Perl also takes the first match it can find, which is why the first one stopped at the start of the string. (Or perhaps you meant "1000" by the "first number". I took it to mean "1" which some regex engines might yield.)

-sam