Much Revered Monks, I come humbly to your presence to ask for light in a regular expression issue,

I need to check whether a certain line matches any of a set of patterns.

I have: if ($line =~ $rex) { ... } where $rex = qr/^.+(s m e f|s f pl|s f).+$/;

How do I make it match the longest "or" possible? If "s f pl" is in the line I'd like that to be the match, and NOT "s f". I wrote the "or" patterns in decreasing order of length from left to right, but it is matching just "s f" even when it could match "s f pl".

Revered Monks, if you can shed any light on this, I'd be most grateful.

humbly, silentius

In reply to match longest sequence in an "or" RE by silentius

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