Ah great. Thank you.

For reference (for future readers of the caml-list archive perhaps), I can
confirm that ocaml-re supports functionality to specify first or shortest
or longest match.

Tom

On 1 October 2014 17:28, Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr> wrote:

> On 29/09/14 22:04, Tom Ridge wrote:
> > I am trying to use the Str module to match regular expressions. I want to
> > return the longest match.[...]  I don't want the order of
> > the alternatives to matter. What am I doing wrong?
>
> Nothing: it's just that Str has first-match semantics, not longest-match.
>
> > What can I do to match the longest substring?
>
> In this particular example, you can sort the string patterns in
> decreasing lexicographic order before putting them in ...|...|...
>
> In more general case, you might have more luck with other regexp
> libraries (e.g. PCRE or Vouillon's RE, but I didn't check whether they
> implement longest match).
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> - Xavier Leroy
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>