If you have a string, for example
"The quick brown fox", "The quicker brown fox".
If you try and use the VIM substitute regexp s/"The quick brown.*"// you'll end up nuking the whole line up to the terminating period mark. This is because the regular expression is acting greedily, and matching up to the second and final " character.
In PERL compatible regexps you would simply modify the expanding part of the regexp to be .*? which makes the expression match as little as possible.
In VIM the syntax is slightly different. To do a non-greedy expansion, you use .\{-}. For example:
s/"The quick brown.\{-}"//This will leave you with
, "The quicker brown fox".