Regular Expression to recognise truncated forms of search string?

Question

I'm trying to formulate a regular expression which will recognise the search term truncated by any number of characters from the right.

For example, if the search term is "pickle", the regex should recognise "pi", "pick" but not "pickaxe".

Initially I came up with the following:

p(i(c(k(l(e)?)?)?)?)?

That works perfectly, but seems a crude way of doing it. Is there a better way of doing this? I had a look around for something similar to what I want, but I'm not entirely sure what to search for.

Answer 1

Due to the way regex works, yes, that's basically the most concise form.