Seems RegEx's 'OR' operator does not work

Question

I have a pattern of regex that should match input that way:

Work -> correct

{"name": "name"} -> correct (any correct json format object)

War And Piece -> incorrect

Expression: "[a-zA-Z0-9]|^\{(\s*\"[a-zA-Z]+\w*\"\s*:\s*\"?\w+\.*\d*\"?\s*)}$"

but first part of expression does not work. It accepts {"name": "name"}, but does not accept 'Work'

Answer 1

For me, it's really hard to determine exactly what your trying to parse out and what you are parsing from. I gathered it's a json something or another which makes me wonder why you're not using a json parser.

In any case perhaps try this slightly modified regex with Pattern/Matcher and pull out group(0) (full matches) with matcher.find(), for example:

String regex = "\\b[a-zA-Z0-9]+\\b|^\\{(\\s*\\\"[a-zA-Z]+\\w*\\\"\\s*:\\s*\\\"?\\w+\\.*\\d*\\\"?\\s*)\\}$";
String string = "Work\n"
              + "{\"name\": \"name\"}\n"
              + "War And Piece";
    
final Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regex, Pattern.MULTILINE);
final Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(string);
    
while (matcher.find()) {
    System.out.println("Full match: " + matcher.group(0));
}

When run I get the following within the console Window:

Full match: Work
Full match: {"name": "name"}
Full match: War
Full match: And
Full match: Piece

If this is not what you are looking for then I'll just delete this post.