Saturday, November 24, 2018

Regular Expressions: Match Single Character with Multiple Possibilities

Regular Expressions: Match Single Character with Multiple Possibilities
You learned how to match literal patterns (/literal/) and wildcard character (/./). Those are the extremes of regular expressions, where one finds exact matches and the other matches everything. There are options that are a balance between the two extremes.

You can search for a literal pattern with some flexibility with character classes. Character classes allow you to define a group of characters you wish to match by placing them inside square ([ and ]) brackets.

For example, you want to match "bag", "big", and "bug" but not "bog". You can create the regex /b[aiu]g/ to do this. The [aiu] is the character class that will only match the characters "a", "i", or "u".

let bigStr = "big";
let bagStr = "bag";
let bugStr = "bug";
let bogStr = "bog";
let bgRegex = /b[aiu]g/;
bigStr.match(bgRegex); // Returns ["big"]
bagStr.match(bgRegex); // Returns ["bag"]
bugStr.match(bgRegex); // Returns ["bug"]
bogStr.match(bgRegex); // Returns null

Use a character class with vowels (a, e, i, o, u) in your regex vowelRegex to find all the vowels in the string quoteSample.

Note
Be sure to match both upper- and lowercase vowels.

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