Book Image

Javascript Regular Expressions

By : Loiane Groner, Gabriel Manricks
Book Image

Javascript Regular Expressions

By: Loiane Groner, Gabriel Manricks

Overview of this book

This book is ideal for JavaScript developers and programmers who work with any type of user entry data and want sharpen their skills to become experts.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Matching alternated options

At this stage, we know how to match any set of characters using vague matchers, and we have the ability to repeat the patterns for any kind of sequence using multipliers, which gives you a pretty good base for matching just about anything. However, even with all this in place, there is one situation that has a tendency to come up and can be an issue. It occurs when dealing with two different and completely separate acceptable forms of input.

Let's say we are parsing some kind of form data, and for each question, we want to extract either a yes or no to be stored somewhere. With our current level of expertise, we can create a pattern similar to /[yn][eo]s?/g, which would match both yes and no. The real problem with this is that it will also match all the other six configurations of these letters, which our app probably won't know how to handle:

Matching alternated options

Luckily, Regex has a completely different system in place to hand situations like this and it is in the form...