A bit of a problem with lazy quantifiers is that they are not so widely supported out of the perl world. Therefore I often need to find some tricks to get similar behavior (eg. "[^,]*," - if coma is separator)
Edit: Cough, after rechecking... PCRE is not as universal as I thought. It seems I've been lucky. :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_regular_expressio...
Edit 2: "Atomic groups" on that wikipedia link is when you can write a full grammar in a large regexp, right? Answer myself: No, it is the name for stopping backtracking. I've seen it as named "possessive" (perldoc perlre).
grep on the Mac used to use PCRE regexes if you used the -P option (`grep -P ....`), but beginning with OS X 10.8 the -P option was removed, so an important place that used to offer PCRE (default grep on a default Mac) actually removed support for it. They didn't replace it with something better; they just took it away. Maybe a Unicode issue?
Not only is PCRE not universal, overall support might even be waning.