note moritz The overriding principle of the regex engine is to try the left-most possible match first. <p>In the case of b*, it matches zero times at the start of the string (ie before the first character) - which is as many as it can, because there are not more than 0 leading b's in your string. <p>In the case of b+, the empty match is not successful, so the regex engine bumps along, and tries to match as many b's as possible, starting from the second position (ie string index 1). <p>So both are greedy, but neither do a search for longest match of consecutive b's. try <code> $ perl -lwe '"abbabbbbc"=~/(b+)/ && print "Found: $1"' Found: bb </code> <p>It used the first position where b+ matched, and there took as many b's as possible. <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-616540"> [http://perl6.org/|Perl 6] - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6. </div></div> 859294 859294