Parentheses ( ) and pipe |

Parentheses ( )

Use parentheses to group parts of an expression together.

For example, if you need to match a set of characters that appear in a number of different product SKUs, then you can group those characters together in parentheses. In this scenario, you have a beach sandal that you sell for men and women, and your product SKUs look like this:

  • MNBS010212 (men's beach sandal, style 01, color 02, size 12)
  • WMBS020208 (women's beach sandal, style 02, color 02, size 08)

You could create the following regular expression to capture all beach-sandal SKUs:

\D+(BS)\d+

  • \D (non-numeric character)
  • + (one or more times)
  • (BS) (character code for beach sandal)
  • \d (numeric character)
  • + (one or more times)

Pipe |

Use the pipe to create an OR condition in an expression.

For example, here's a way to create an expression to match your beach-sandal SKUs:

(MN|WM)BS\d+

  • (MN OR WM)
  • BS (character code for beach sandals)
  • \d (numeric character)
  • + (one or more times)