leftmost longest match (of disjunctions) ; greediness of "|"

[Joerg Schuster]

Joerg Schuster <js at cis.uni-muenchen.de> writes:

> Padraig at Linux.ie writes:
> 
> > Joerg Schuster wrote:
> > > Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> writes:
> > >
> > >> produce a longer overall match.  In other words, the "|" operator
> > >> is never greedy.
> > > O.k. Thanks for pointing this out. Maybe I should have formulated my
> > > question differently: Is there a trick (be it dirty or not) to make
> > > "|" greedy in python?
> > 
> > sort the re by size first?
> 
> The point is not to get the match of the longest part of the
> disjunction, but to get the match of that part of the disjunction
> which is the longest one. (The match of ".*" may be much longer than
> the match of "abc", although the latter regex contains more
> characters.)
> 
> Jörg

I should have read your mail more carefully. You wrote about sorting
the *re*, not about sorting the regex. Sorry.

Jörg