The closest mention I could see to this problem and perhaps a clue is: The additional state of being matched with zero-length is associated with the matched string, and is reset by each assignment to "pos()". So perhaps the issue is that the previous match succeeded - but did not advance pos, so when the /\G \z/ hits, pos doesn't advance and for some reason perl doesn't treat it as a successful match. I'm still with davido. I think this is a bit of a bug - it introduces failure at a distance in custom parsing engines. Luckily for cases such as these pos == length happens to be true.