Regex to match the longest repeating substring

Question

I\'m writing regular expression for checking if there is a substring, that contains at least 2 repeats of some pattern next to each other. I\'m matching the result of regex

Answer 1

Here's a long-ish script that does what you ask. It basically goes through your input string, shortens it by one, then goes through it again. Once all possible matches are found, it returns one of the longest. It is possible to tweak it so that all the longest matches are returned, instead of just one, but I'll leave that to you.

It's pretty rudimentary code, but hopefully you'll get the gist of it.

use v5.10;
use strict;
use warnings;

while () {
    chomp;
    print "$_ : ";
    my $longest = foo($_);
    if ($longest) {
        say $longest;
    } else {
        say "No matches found";
    }
}

sub foo {
    my $num = shift;
    my @hits;
    for my $i (0 .. length($num)) {
        my $part = substr $num, $i;
        push @hits, $part =~ /(.+)(?=\1)/g;
    }
    my $long = shift @hits;
    for (@hits) {
        if (length($long) < length) {
            $long = $_;
        }
    }
    return $long;
}

__DATA__
56712453289
22010110100
5555555
1919191919
191919191919
2323191919191919