What is wrong with my regex?

It's too greedy. Make  .* less greedy by adding the  ? "lazy" modifier to the  * "zero-or-more" quantifier to make it  .*? instead.

Update: See Quantifiers in perlre; also see discussions of greedy/lazy matching in perlretut. (Update: See also Quantifiers in regular expressions in Tutorials.)

Update 2: Example: 

c:\@Work\Perl\monks\OldChamp>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $s = 'keep me ZIP delete this ZAP also keep this ZIP kill too ZAP 
+keep too';
 print qq{'$s'};
 ;;
 (my $t = $s) =~ s{ ZIP .* ZAP }{}xmsg;
 print qq{greedy .*: '$t'};
 ;;
 ($t = $s) =~ s{ ZIP .*? ZAP }{}xmsg;
 print qq{lazy .*?: '$t'};
"
'keep me ZIP delete this ZAP also keep this ZIP kill too ZAP keep too'
greedy .*: 'keep me  keep too'
lazy .*?: 'keep me  also keep this  keep too'

[download]

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

In reply to Re: How to modify my regex? by AnomalousMonk
in thread How to modify my regex? by OldChamp

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