greediness in sed

Question

I want

ereg ($rat, $dog, $cat)

to become

preg_match (\'#\'.$rat.\'#\', $dog, $cat)

To achieve this, I did

Answer 1

How about:

$ echo 'ereg ($rat, $dog, $cat)' | sed "s/ereg *(\([^,]*\), \([^,]*\)\([^)]*\))/preg_match('#'.\1.'#', \2\3)/g"
preg_match('#'.$rat.'#', $dog, $cat)