Re^2: match longest sequence in an "or" RE

[Corion]

I think one of the problems is the greedy .+ at the start of the regex. It would be better to leave it off or make it nongreedy. Then, just sorting by length decreasing makes the thing work again:

>perl -wMstrict -lE "say /^.+?(s m e f|s f pl|s f).+$/ for '-s m e f s
+ f pl s f-';"
s m e f

[AnomalousMonk]

It's necessary to leave off the first  .+ entirely and sort all the captured alternations by length decreasing (or some similar approach). Just making the first  .+ non-greedy is not sufficient to find the longest match anywhere in the string:

>perl -wMstrict -lE
"say q{'}, /^.+?(s m e f|s f pl|s f).+$/, q{' at offset }, $-[1]
   for '-s f s f pl s m e f-';
"
's f' at offset 1