I have a number of regular expressions regex1, regex2, ..., regexN combined into a single regex as regex1|regex2|...|regexN. I would like to reorder the component expressions so that the combined expression gives the longest possible match at the beginning of a given string.
I believe this means reordering the regular expressions such that "if regexK matches a prefix of regexL, then L < K". If this is correct, is it possible to find out, in general, whether regexK can match a prefix of regexL?