How is the AND/OR operator represented as in Regular Expressions?
I'm currently programming a vocabulary algorithm that checks if a user has typed in the word correctly. I have the following situation: The correct solution for the word would be "part1, part2". The user should be able to enter either "part1" (answer 1), "part2" (answer 2) or "part1, part2" (answer 3). I now try to match the string given by the user with the following, automatically created, regex expression:
^(part1|part2)$
This only returns answer 1 and 2 as correct while answer 3 would be wrong. I'm now wondering whether there's an operator similar to | that says and/or instead of either...or.
May anyone help me solve this problem?
Answer
I'm going to assume you want to build a the regex dynamically to contain other words than part1 and part2, and that you want order not to matter. If so you can use something like this:
((^|, )(part1|part2|part3))+$
Positive matches:
part1
part2, part1
part1, part2, part3
Negative matches:
part1, //with and without trailing spaces.
part3, part2,
otherpart1