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Perl has two sets of quantifiers: the maximal match quantifiers like *, +, ? (sometimes called greedy) and the minimal march quantifies *?, +?, ??, and {}?. The latter are also called lazy quantifiers.
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Those lazy quantifiers were introduced in Perl rather late and as such are not well described in literature and used less frequently then they deserver. The fact that standard * and + quantifiers are greedy and scan the text until the last match of specific substring, not the first one like index function does often lead to difficult to debut mistakes.
Perl idioms like .* and .+ match as many characters as possible between two anchors that you provide and may not provide the behavior that you need. But you can convert greedy quantifies into lazy by addition a ? (question mark).
Let's assume that we need to parse the Unix full path file specification. For example:
$_ = '/home/nick/mydata/phones.dat';The regular expression {^/.*/} will match the full path of the file, because greediness guarantees that the last "/" in pattern will match the last "/" in fully qualified filename. This can be seen by running the following script:
$_ = '/home/nick/mydata/phones.dat';
m{/.*/};
print "full path=$&, filename=$' \n";
If you want to extract the top level directory you need to use non greedy version (*?):
$_ = '/home/nick/mydata/phones.dat';
m{/(.+?)/.*/};
print "top level directory=$1";
Lazy quantifies are essentially a way to organize a search in regex and as such they are easier to understand and are less prone to bugs.
The non-greedy quantifiers in the "Regular Expressions" section of perlre (1), and in the "the rules of regular expression matching" section of Chapter 2 of Programming Perl
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