That was a fantastic demonstration of what backtracking meant. Thank you John for your in depth description of what went wrong.
As a follow up, would something like `[^=]=.` be a better capture group regex?
replies(1):
As a follow up, would something like `[^=]=.` be a better capture group regex?
/.*=.*/ becomes /[^=]*=.*/
Where the first regex is 57 steps for x=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, the second is just 7.
Avoid using greedy .* for backtracking regex engines! Give your greedy regex engine the hints it needs to do what it does best.