28. Perl Options - Modifying Greediness

• Pesky greediness! It's always taking up all the characters, and only backtracking when it has to. What a pain - there's all these regexes that I need to write where I know that:
  1. I only want to match the minimum number of characters to make the match successful.
  2. I know that only one match is going to work - but if it didn't have to do all that backtracking, it would run so much faster!
• Well, fear not! For Perl has support for minimal, or lazy, quantifiers!

    *?
    +?
    ??
    {min, max}?
  

• For example:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    $_ = "* This isn't fantastic, let's drink fanta!";
    if (m/fanta(.*)n/) {
      print "$1\n";
    }
    if (m/fanta(.*?)n/) {
      print "$1\n";
    }
  

  gives:

    stic, let's drink fa
    stic, let's dri