I wish to match the same as the following regex would (you can ignore the scalar at the end of my pattern - it is just a substitution for a simple search string): /(\d+\.\d+)($meanSearchTerm)/oi. That is it matches strings of the form: floating point numbersearch string. I simply wish to modify the greedy quantification to possessive to prevent any chance of catastrophic backtracking. Thus I do not intend to quantify the quantifier (as perl naively assumes).