Greedy and Ungreedy Matching

Perl regular expressions normally match the longest string possible. For instance:

my($text) = "mississippi";
$text =~ m/(i.*s)/;
print $1 . "\n";

Run the preceding code, and here's what you get:

ississ

It matches the first i, the last s, and everything in between them. But what if you want to match the first i to the s most closely following it? Use this code:

my($text) = "mississippi";
$text =~ m/(i.*?s)/;
print $1 . "\n";

Now look what the code produces:

is

Clearly, the use of the question mark makes the match ungreedy. But theres another problem in that regular expressions always try to match as early as possible.