Lesson 14: It's all conditional

As we mentioned before, it's always good to be precise, and that applies to coding, talking, and even regular expressions. For example, you wouldn't write a grocery list for someone to Buy more .* because you would have no idea what you could get back. Instead you would write Buy more milk or Buy more bread, and in regular expressions, we can actually define these conditionals explicitly.

Specifically when using groups, you can use the | (logical OR, aka. the pipe) to denote different possible sets of characters. In the above example, I can write the pattern "Buy more (milk|bread|juice)" to match only the strings Buy more milk, Buy more bread, or Buy more juice.

Like normal groups, you can use any sequence of characters or metacharacters in a condition, for example, ([cb]ats*|[dh]ogs?) would match either cats or bats, or, dogs or hogs. Writing patterns with many conditions can be hard to read, so you should consider making them separate patterns if they get too complex.

Go ahead and try writing a conditional pattern that matches only the lines with small fuzzy creatures below.

Exercise 14: Matching conditional text
Task Text  
match I love cats To be completed
match I love dogs To be completed
skip I love logs To be completed
skip I love cogs To be completed
Solution

By using the logical or, we can match the first two lines by using the expression I love (cats|dogs). But logs and cogs are pretty cool too.

Solve the above task to continue on to the next problem, or read the Solution.