I suspect that since ".*" is such a commonly used term in regexps, Eli might be misreading the regexp.
From the Emacs manual on regular _expression_ special characters:
"‘.’ (Period)
is a special character that matches any single character except a newline.
Using concatenation, we can make regular expressions like ‘a.b’, which
matches any three-character string that begins with ‘a’ and ends with
‘b’."
You can verify the behavior of "."
(string-match "^." "No greedy modifiers here")
(match-data)
> (0 1)
(string-match "^.*" "This has a greedy modifier")
(match-data)
> (0 26)
Further discussion should be moved off this list.
-Erik.
On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 11:01 AM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> From: Erik Anderson <erikbpanderson@gmail.com>
>> Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 14:36:06 +0000
>> Cc: 15107@debbugs.gnu.org
>>
>> Per the replace-regexp-in-string docstring: "Replace all matches for REGEXP with REP in STRING."
>
> Yes, and there is a single match in this case, so a single
> replacement. The _entire_ input string matches the regexp, so after
> that match there's nothing else left to match.
>
> What am I missing?
"^." matches only the first character of "foo bar", but maybe you have
a different idea of "matches" than I do. I would consider "^..*" to
match the whole string.