def filter_spans(spans):
    """Filter a sequence of spans and remove duplicates or overlaps. Useful for
    creating named entities (where one token can only be part of one entity) or
    when merging spans with `Retokenizer.merge`. When spans overlap, the (first)
    longest span is preferred over shorter spans.

    spans (iterable): The spans to filter.
    RETURNS (list): The filtered spans.
    """
    get_sort_key = lambda span: (span.end - span.start, -span.start)
    sorted_spans = sorted(spans, key=get_sort_key, reverse=True)
    result = []
    seen_tokens = set()
    for span in sorted_spans:
        if span.start not in seen_tokens and span.end - 1 not in seen_tokens:
            result.append(span)
        seen_tokens.update(range(span.start, span.end))
    result = sorted(result, key=lambda span: span.start)
    return result
