Re^2: Why is this regex greedy?

[pbeckingham]

So it is not treating that .+? the way I expected? Even though there are more-minimal matches?

I guess leftmost-longest trumps non-greedy.

[duff]

Right and right.

I don't understand why people expect non-greedy matching to actually mean "globally shortest match". Perhaps it's in the language we use. Just keep the left-to-rightness as the most prominent feature of your mental model of how perl's RE engine works and you shouldn't go wrong though.