It seems I’m sitting on my eyes, because I cannot find out whats wrong with my regular expression:

I’m trying to parse a C source file that contains strings within a line (actually those strings are regular expressions, but that shall be unimportant).
Basically /"([^"]*)"/ should capture the string (without quotes) unless there are double quotes in it.

I could match double-quotes in side the string using /(\"*)/! too, but I failed to combine both regular expressions:

Using /"((?:[^"]|\")*)"/ (capture the text between double-quotes until the first non-escaped double-quotes) the capture ends after the first ", as shown in this example debugger session:

  DB<15> $x='"SAMSUNG SSD SM841N? (2\.5"? 7mm |mSATA )?(128|256|512)GB( SED)?|"'

  DB<16> x $x =~ s/"((?:[^"]|\")*)"//
0  1
  DB<17> x $x
0  '? 7mm |mSATA )?(128|256|512)GB( SED)?|"'
  DB<18>

While writing this question, I tried to swap both alternatives, and suddenly it worked:

  DB<18> $x='"SAMSUNG SSD SM841N? (2\.5"? 7mm |mSATA )?(128|256|512)GB( SED)?|"'

  DB<19> x $x =~ s/"((?:\"|[^"])*)"//
0  1
  DB<20> x $x
0  ''
  DB<21>

So aren’t regular expressions A|B and B|A equivalent?