perltutorial root Another useful thing would be able to match a certain number of characters that matched a certain criteria. There are two types of searches you can do when you're dealing with quantifiers: greedy or nongreedy, or in other terms maximal, and minimal. A maximal or greedy search tries to match as many characters as it can while still returning a true value. So if we were looking for 1 to 4 b's in a row and had a string with 3 b's in a row we would match the 3 b's. If it was a minimal or nongreedy search only the first b would be matched. Here's a table that sums up quantifiers. <TABLE border=1> <TR><TD>Greedy</TD><TD>Nongreedy</TD><TD>Allowed numbers for a match</TD></TR> <TR><TD>?</TD><TD>??</TD><TD>0 or 1 time</TD></TR> <TR><TD>+</TD><TD>+?</TD><TD>1 or more times</TD></TR> <TR><TD>*</TD><TD>*?</TD><TD>0 or more times</TD></TR> <TR><TD>{i}</TD><TD>{i}?</TD><TD>exactly i times</TD></TR> <TR><TD>{i,}</TD><TD>{i,}?</TD><TD>i or more times</TD></TR> <TR><TD>{i,j}</TD><TD>{i,j}?</TD><TD>at lease i times and at most j times</TD></TR> </TABLE> Obviously Perl needs to know what these quantifiers are referring to. The quantifier is associated with the character directly to its left unless parentheses are used for grouping. <PRE><CODE> /b{3}/ #matches three b's /(ha){3}/ #matches hahaha </CODE></PRE> Onto [Character Class Abbreviations]