Regular expression with pipe

Question

It seems to me that | has a special meaning in regular expression world. I am using ruby and could not find much documentation on same.

http://rubular.com/regexes/11724 works.

http://rubular.com/regexes/11725 does not work. Why and what is the correct regex.

Answer 1

Use a delimiter to escape your characters:

/(\w+)\|(\w+)\|(\w+)/

Answer 2

| means boolean "or" in regex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

Answer 3

In regular expressions certain characters have special meanings. For instance, the bar character "|" is used to represent that multiple patterns may match - basically it works as an OR operator. In order to use the literal character instead of the special meaning, you simply have to use a delimiter. Use "\|" instead of "|" for the literal character.