JavaScript Regular Expressions

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 ...