Alternative — Regular Expressions (Regexp)

Let's see how we can use regular expressions to find similar character combinations.

If we want to find the substrings gray or grow in the string, we need to use a mechanism called “alternation”: we enter the first possible option, followed by a “|”, followed by the second option. We can see the following match:

/gray|grow/

gray grow grey

The same condition can be written in an even shorter way. Since these substrings have a common part, let's enter gr characters and then, using grouping, add an alternative:

/gr(ay|ow)/

gray grow grey

Grouping is very important here. If we remove it, the alternative to gray becomes ow:

/gray|ow/

gray grow grey

Below is another interesting example of using alternation. While it's spelt gray in American English, in British English it's grey In order to avoid missing any of the options in the text, we can use a concise alternative:

/gr(a|e)y/

gray grow grey

And we can simplify the resulting expression, since the alternative uses single characters. Let's specify a character class that consists of the characters a and e:

/gr[ae]y/

gray grow grey

In this case, the regular expression mechanism, whose job is to match things, works much more efficiently with character classes, especially single classes.

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