Re: minimal superstrings/maximal substrings

[AnomalousMonk]

Something like this?

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"my @lexi_short = qw(numeric sociobio social);
 ;;
 my ($rx_lexi_short) =
   map  qr{ (?i) \A (?: $_) .+ }xms,
   join ' | ',
   map  quotemeta,
   reverse sort
   @lexi_short
   ;
 ;;
 printf '%s ', $_ for grep /$rx_lexi_short/,
   qw(socialist sociobiologist numerical NUMERICIST),
   qw(social antisocial numeric bio cia)
   ;
"
socialist sociobiologist numerical NUMERICIST

See haukex's Building Regex Alternations Dynamically.

Update: For future reference, please see also Short, Self-Contained, Correct Example and How to ask better questions using Test::More and sample data (and maybe I know what I mean. Why don't you?).