Non-greedy matchin in regex

From: tomthepom_at_[hidden]
Date: 2001-11-01 17:38:30

I'm hoping this is a quick 'You idiot, you know nothing about regular 
expressions' problem.

I'm looking at stripping leading and trailing spaces off a string.  
Why does the expression;

std::string file("  hello  ");
boost::cmatch whatis;
boost::regex_match(file,  whatis, boost::regex("^\\s*(.*?)\\s*$"));

match the leading spaces - i.e. it results in "   hello", rather 
than "hello" ?

The equivalent perl expression

 s/^\s*(.*?)\s*$/$1/

is a standard, if inefficient way of stripping both leading and 
trailing spaces.

What am I missing?

I'm using boost 1.25.0 on vc6sp4

Tom Platts-Mills