Use the
|
(pipe)
character in a regular expression to have the regular expression engine
consider alternatives for a match. For example, the following regular expression
matches any one of the words
cat, dog, pig, rat
:
var pattern:RegExp = /cat|dog|pig|rat/;
You can use parentheses to define groups to restrict the scope
of the | alternator. The following regular expression matches
cat
followed
by
nap
or
nip
:
var pattern:RegExp = /cat(nap|nip)/;
For more information, see
Groups
.
The following two regular expressions, one using the
|
alternator,
the other using a character class (defined with
[
and
]
),
are equivalent:
/1|3|5|7|9/
/[13579]/
For more information, see
Character classes
.
