reluctant quantifier doesn't work

Hi all,

I use an regex in Java 6 as this:
"<a .*?some string here</a>"

and expect that .*? will match the smallest char sequence.
However, it matches the longest.

I give this regex to a method I wrote:
	private Matcher getMatcherMLDA(String regex, String input) {
		Pattern pat = Pattern.compile(regex,Pattern.MULTILINE |
Pattern.DOTALL);
		Matcher matcher = pat.matcher(input);
		return matcher;
	}

It looks like the reluctant quantifier doesn't work.
thanks!