Is greediness irrelevant when matching whole lines?

[loris]

Dear all,

Am I right in thinking that, if I am matching whole lines, rather than parts of lines, greediness or not relevant when constructing the regular expression?

Thanks,

loris

[Corion]

For a regular expression to match at all, it does not matter whether the regex engine or the regex subexpressions are greedy or nongreedy. Both will give up or match more if that's neccessary to make the whole match succeed. If you care about how the regular expression matches, greedyness becomes an issue:

for (<DATA>) {
    print "Greedy: $1/$2\n";
        if /^(a+)(a+)$/;
    print "Non-greedy: $1/$2\n";
        if /^(a+?)(a+)$/;
};

[bart]

Correct. Greediness determines how it matches, not whether it matches. Greedy and non-greedy regexes will either both match, or neither.

As you allow only one way to match, due to anchors etc., greediness can barely play any role — apart from how subpatterns match. Do you even care about subpatterns?

[FunkyMonk]

dominus wrote an excellent article on how the RE engine works, although it may not be current, I'll think you'll find it interesting.