Regular expression to search for Gadaffi

Question

I\'m trying to search for the word Gadaffi. What\'s the best regular expression to search for this?

My best attempt so far is:

\\b[KG]h?add?af?fi$\\         


        

Answer 1

If you've got a concrete listing of all 30 possibilities, just concatenate them all together with a bunch of "ors". Then you can be sure that it only matches the exact things you've listed, and no more. Your RE engine will probably be able to optimize in further, and, well, with 30 choices even if it doesn't it's still not a big deal. Trying to fiddle around with manually turning it into a "clever" RE can't possibly turn out better and may turn out worse.