With minimal matching, however, the engine backtracks after every character. The first thing it tries to match is ", and it fails every time, then backs up and tries matching .+?, until it finds the ". It's doing more work that way, so it's slower.
No, perhaps you are confusing .+ with .+?. With .+?, it's inching forward a character at a time each time it can't find a " immediately there.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

In reply to Re: Re: Re: (bbfu) (dot star) Re: Extract potentially quoted words by merlyn
in thread Extract potentially quoted words by merlyn

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