Hi,

So I've organized a regex that uses alternation so that the longest match will come out first. That makes sense.

Code

Say I have the word "conscious" and I want to match the "scious" portion. When matched with the regex, it returns "iou", which is correct. However, I would also like to get the smallest possible match, which is just "i". The problem is that I can't change the original regex, but I can append to it.

Is there a good way to go about finding both the largest and smallest match?

$foo = 'conscious'; 
$foo =~ /([aeiou]{2,}?)/; 
print $1;

$foo = 'conscious'; 
$foo =~ /([aeiou])[aeiou]+/; 
print $1;