> Then should i say that it is same as "*?", which is common in other popular > languages ? Strange that I had answered "Yes" and Little Bee (aka Petite Abeille) answers later "No" to the same simple question ! Comparing Lua manual [1] with Perl manual [2] for non greedy expressions really look the same for me. [1] http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/manual.html#6.4.1 [2] http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#Quantifiers