greediness in sed

Question

I want

ereg ($rat, $dog, $cat)

to become

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

To achieve this, I did

Answer 1

I rather like Perl regexs (easier to write):

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

or better (for PHP):

echo 'ereg ($rat, $dog, $cat)' | perl -pe 's/ereg\s*\(\s*(\$[^,]+),(.+)\)/preg_match("#{$1}#", $2)/g'

In sed, it would be:

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

Too many backslashes!!!