How do I use RegEx to pick longest match?

Question

I tried looking for an answer to this question but just couldn\'t finding anything and I hope that there\'s an easy solution for this. I have and using the following code i

Answer 1

If you already know the lengths of the words beforehand, then put the longest first. For example:

String pattern = ("(hello world|hello)");

The longest will be matched first. If you don't know the lengths beforehand, this isn't possible.

An alternative approach would be to store all the matches in an array/hash/list and pick the longest one manually, using the language's built-in functions.