Alternation

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.