Hello, This is my first posting to the keepers of wisdom, so I'll try to keep it brief. I've found that I need to stack a lot of regular expressions in order to force pattern matching to occur first on larger comlpex patterns then on the smaller patterns that they are composed of It seems to me that this is simply greedy matching, with the special circumstance that the largest patterns are made up of optional and obligatory combinations of other patterns that will match at least the minimal pattern. For instance: 
$np1="(?:$det|$gen)";
$np2 ="(?:$adj|$num|$conj|$adv|$inf)";
$np3="(?:$np1*\s*($noun)*\s*$np2*\s*($noun)+\s*$adj*)";

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used together in the following manner: $NP = "(?:(?:$np1)*\s*$np2*(?:$np3)+)"; As I've mentioned, I want to match the longest patterns first but allow for matching on the smaller patterns, which is my reason for including Kleene stars for optional subpatterns. The problem that I'm having is that the optionality leads to matching the minimal patterns and never the optionally longer ones. My question then is whether I need to do as I am now doing, and matching the longest patterns, or the next longest, and so on down to the minimal patterns ? I ask because the OR grouping from greatest coverage to least seems to also be missing longer patterns. So to sum, I need to match long patterns composed of smaller patterns where the long ones match first, then failing that, the long ones match. If my question is overly simple, or my discussion of it unclear, I apologize in advance Thanks,

In reply to greedy and lazy by Anonymous Monk

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