note runrig <em>I would expect any of the following: hello,hi,othello,brake,rake,raker,rash,ash,hash,ohio, the,lob,bra,hell,era</em> <p>I don't see how you could expect some of those strings, because some only appear once in the string (e.g. "othello", "ohio"), so you really couldn't call them a "pattern" unless you're matching against a dictionary file. <p>My solution near the top of this thread sort of assumes that the string is a contiguous series of patterns (one of the original constraints was "String contains nothing but patterns"), so it only finds "hello" from your test string, but if you change this line:<code> # From this if (/\G(.{2,})(?=.*?\1)/g) { # To this if (/\G.*?(.{2,})(?=.*?\1)/g) { </code> Then it does better and finds "ash", "rake", and "hello" from your test string, which is about as good as it gets, I believe. 111621 111735