Quite correct! As written the regex would match Nullamie as well as Nullam and the greediness would eat the first augue!

Another way to calm greediness is the the ? modifier, .+ is a maximal match, .+? is a minimal match, like: $data =~ /(Nullam\b.+?(?:augue|libero)\.)/g); That's sometimes a good way to go and would work if we didn't have the "." to help us out here. Although I like your [^.]+ your idea looks great to me! There is more than one way to skin these regex cats!