in reply to Possessive Quantifiers in Perl 5.10 regexps

Your regex doesn't backtrack if there is a closing quote, so in this case the possessive quantifier doesn't help here.

I guess that the regex engine optimizes the search by looking for a literal ", and fails immediately if it can't find one. That works the same way in both cases.

Update: to disable this optimization you can use ["'] instead of " (a single char character class doesn't disable it).

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