Quick help with regular expressions

Ah, didn't know about the buffers in the re.sub() function. No wonder why I couldn't make heads from tails on it. Devil's sub() function worked perfectly.

One question:

"(.*?)" <--- Isn't the *? redundant? Couldn't it just as well be "(.*)"? What am I missing here?

Also, Python's regex parser leans heavily on Perl. I wouldn't be surprised if Dusk's expression worked too.