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

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In reply to Re^2: match longest sequence in an "or" RE by Corion
in thread match longest sequence in an "or" RE by silentius

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