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

[Joerg Schuster]

"Fredrik Lundh" <fredrik at pythonware.com> writes:

> Joerg Schuster wrote:
> 
> > I should have read your mail more carefully. You wrote about sorting
> > the *re*, not about sorting the regex. Sorry.
> 
> what's the difference?


One could suspect that re.search() first matches with a greedy "|", then
stores all the matches of all parts of the disjunction in the
re-object and then returns the first one. 

Jörg