Emacs regexp-replace seems to work unexpectedly

I am trying to remove some <span style="something not constant"&开发者_JAVA百科gt; from a text and I tried M-x replace-regexp> "<span*>" -> ""

but it does nothing. I made sure the cursor is at the beginning of the file.

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You must probably know that * in a regex means 'repetition', and i'm not sure you want to remove something like <spannnnn>, do you ?

What you mean is probably: <span.*>

PS: Made the same mistake as you ;)