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Consider changing "either of" to "any of".

The word "either" implies only two choices, making your opening example confusing when the first "either of" was really picking from three possibilities.




Also 'begin' is vague - it could mean start of word, here it means start of line. Make it 'start of line'

I like the general approach, although the 2010-era BDD fake natural language is a turn off.


A really good shorthand for "start of line" is "^"

;o)


A really good shorthand for "yes, however it's not the most discoverable thing in the world" is "& ^ ( ^ ^ % & ^"


Is it less discoverable than the proposed alternative though?

In both cases one looks up the documentation, in one I find that search for the line start requires a regex with "^" and in the other I find something like "begin with" of Simple Regex Language (SRL). I still need to read (or test) to find what "begin with" means and I still couldn't guess it - why not "start with", "open with", "first character", or a myriad of other possible options.

Whatever suits the user I suppose.


Since code is read more than it is written, how well do you think a colleague without previous knowledge of regexs could understand '^' vs 'start of line'?




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