I'm probably missing something, but I don't see the circumstances under which /(ab*){32766}/ couldn't be replaced by /(ab+|a){32766}/ with the same outcome (except the core dump), but much less backtracking?

Likewise, is there anything that /"((?:\\.|[^"])+)"/ would match that /"([^"]+)"/ wouldn't?

Your first factorisation(sp?) is valid - (ab*){32766} and (ab+|a){32766} are equivalent, as they will both match and not match exactly the same strings (modulo any deficiencies in the Perl interpreter). Your second factorization is not equivalent, as the first regex allows for backslashed items, which the second doesn't:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my @regexen = (
  qr/"((?:\\.|[^"])+)"/,
  qr/"([^"]+)"/,
);

for (<DATA>) {
    for my $r (@regexen) {
        print "$_\t";
        print "\t$r";
        if (/$r/) {
            print "\tMatch\t($1)\n";
        } else { 
            print "\tNo match.\n"; 
        };
    };
};

__DATA__
"foo\"bar"
[download]

Corion answers your second point; on the first point, refactoring to /(ab+|a)+/ reduces stack usage but does not eliminate it: for me, "a" x $n cores with /(ab*)+/ at n=10080 and with /(ab+|a)+/ at n=20157, so it appears to save exactly half of the stack usage.

As TimToady mentioned, anything that quantifies "a compound submatch of varying length" will trigger it. (In fact even "compound" does not seem required, as /(a+?)+/ attests.)

Hugo

On my system using 5.8.6, /(ab*){$n}/ cores with $n == 21166, whereas /(ab|a){$n}/ completes sucessfully for all values on $n upto the repetition limit of 32766. If I drop the stack reservation to 8 MB (similar to the default on Linux?), then I get a similar breakpoint of 10582.

That seems to indicate that (OMS), the regex engine requires 792 bytes of stack for each repetition. That seems a lot of state to preserve on the stack, but I know nothing about how the regex engine is implemented, so it's probably not.

It does make me wonder whether repetition counts, at least in these fairly simple cases, couldn't be fulfilled with by a tail recursive routine to alleviate the stack growth?

If not, isn't there some scope for putting a check of the form die 'Not enough stack' if reps > stacksize / 792?

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