Yeah the latter. In an engine supporting ^ and $, searching for this (a|b|^)(c|d|^)foo is equivalent to searching for this ^((.*a|.*b)(c|d)|c|d)?foo

Yeah the latter. In an engine supporting ^ and $, searching for this (a|b|^)(c|d|^)foo is equivalent to searching for this ^((.*a|.*b)(c|d)|c|d)?foo.*$ And in this context you can drop the leading/trailing ^/$ since they are implicit.