I beg to differ. My general principle is to be lax on what I receive and strict on what I emit. So I try to write my regexen as lax as possible and to "synchronize" my match on characters/sequences I am sure will be present in the input. This means that I often use .*? in my regexen. Using the greedy counterpart will lead to a lot of backtracking and more so geometrically with the number of .*?. Also I incrementally build my regexen testing them on samples: non greedy match also is less a nuisance here when examining the matches.

Regexen are a tricky art and I like to abuse it at (*) the risk of being called demented. (*) And I beg to disagree with Felix Gallo, France is the lang of semiology, not of semiotics... and hair splitting too, BTW. And, on a related field, the main tagmemics foray in France is collateral to the introduction of american camelides but has yet to appear widely in French. tagmemique is indeed French neologism that googlewhacks until the present node referencing of a node

-- stefp (qui aime couper les cheveux en quatre)-- check out TeXmacs wiki