Text Processing with JavaScript

Recipe 27

Matching One of Several Characters with the Character Class

Task

Suppose you want to find a word in a document even if it is misspelled. For example, the word “license” is one of the most misspelled words in English. You want to write a pattern that matches “license,” “licence,” “lisence,” or “lisense” in a document.

Solution

Use a character class:

part_2/character_class/character_class_ex1.js

const re = /li[sc]en[sc]e/;

re.test("A driver's license");    // → true
re.test("A driver's lisense");    // → true
re.test("A driver's licence");    // → true
re.test("A shopping list");       // → false

A character class matches only one out of the specified characters. In this code, the specified characters are “s” ...