Regex matching in a Bash if statement

Question

What did I do wrong here?

Trying to match any string that contains spaces, lowercase, uppercase, or numbers. Special characters would be nice too, but I think that r

Answer 1

In case someone wanted an example using variables...

#!/bin/bash

# Only continue for 'develop' or 'release/*' branches
BRANCH_REGEX="^(develop$|release//*)"

if [[ $BRANCH =~ $BRANCH_REGEX ]];
then
    echo "BRANCH '$BRANCH' matches BRANCH_REGEX '$BRANCH_REGEX'"
else
    echo "BRANCH '$BRANCH' DOES NOT MATCH BRANCH_REGEX '$BRANCH_REGEX'"
fi