I am not quite agreeable to the statement about what '.*' should match.
For my understanding '.' should ignore newlines always but if the operator /s is used. That means that '.+' and '.*' are just multiple searches of '.' and should still ignore newlines.
Now I understand $ and \z as the following... $ means to matches both the end and the newline before - quote perldoc - and \z only the end but not the newline.
print "foo matched\n" if "foo\n" =~ /^foo$/;
print "bar matched\n" if "bar\n" =~ /^bar$ \n/x; # $ before end or newline
print "baz doesn't matched\n" if "baz\n" !~ /^baz\z/;
print "foobar matched\n" if "foobar\n" =~ /^foobar\n\z/; # \z after newline
print "match foo\n" if "foo\n" =~ /.*$/; # .* ignore newline and $ is before newline
print "doesn't match bar\n" if "bar\n" !~ /.*\z/; # .* ignore newline and \z is after newline
print "match baz\n" if "baz\n" =~ /.?\z/; # but what the hell happends here?
for ( qr/(.?)\n\z/, qr/(.?)\z/ ) {
"hello world\n" =~ $_;
print "-$1-\n";
}
-d-
--
It seems that '.?' ignore the newline as expected and search on after the newline with '.?\z', because it searches _until_ '\z'. Also it seems that '.*' matches until the newline and not between '\n' and '\z'. '.*' is greedy, '.?' not. Maybe I missunderstand it.