06. Greediness (continued)

• Lets look at another example of greediness, and how it can give a result you may not have been expecting.
• Consider this sentance:

    This isn't fantastic, let's drink fanta!
  

• Say we use Perl to match this with the regex:

    fanta(.*)
  

• What do we expect to be in the variable $1 (i.e. in the brackets as matched by ".*")?
• Well, we know that "." will match all characters (except those we talked about last lecture), so we would expect to see the following match:

    This isn't fantastic, let's drink fanta!
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  

  So, $1 would be:

    stic, let's drink fanta!
  

• Now, what if we said the regex was:

    fanta(.*).*
  

• Would anything change?