Re: Perl 5's "non-greedy" matching can be TOO greedy!

On Dec 14, Randal L. Schwartz said:

>Deven> I haven't even SEEN an example where the current behavior is
>Deven> actually preferable than my proposed behavior, have you?  (And
>Deven> I'd expect at least a FEW, though I suspect there are probably
>Deven> more counterexamples.)
>
>If I want the leftmost B that is followed by the shortest number
>of characters to get to a D, I write /B.*?D/.  The "leftmost" part
>keeps getting left out of regex discussions, and maybe that's why
>you're thrown off.  But it's a pretty consistent overriding factor.
>
>If you want something odd like "not necessarily the leftmost", then
>you'll need to speak more.  But "leftmost" is fundamental to the
>design of regex.  Don't mess with that.  Or don't call it a regex any
>more.

You could use my sexeger technique to get this behavior (possibly):

  $string = "aaabbbcccdddeee";
  # regex to be reversed: /b(.*?)d/
  $revstr = reverse $string;
  ($match) = $revstr =~ /d(.*?)b/;

No, that doesn't quite work.  It works when you unroll the .*? loop:

  # regex to be reversed: /b([^bd]*)d/
  ($match) = $revstr =~ /d([^bd]*)b/;

But then why would you use sexeger at all, when you can unroll the loop in
the forward direction?

  ($match) = $string =~ /b([^bd]*)d/;

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