Why does the order of alternatives matter in regex?

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The regular expression engine tries to match the alternatives in the order in which they are specified. So when the pattern is (foo|foobar)&? it matches foo immediately and continues trying to find matches. The next bit of the input string is bar& b which cannot be matched.

In other words, because foo is part of foobar, there is no way (foo|foobar) will ever match foobar, since it will always match foo first.

Occasionally, this can be a very useful trick, actually. The pattern (o|a|(\w)) will allow you to capture \w and a or o differently:

Regex.Replace("a foobar& b", "(o|a|(\\w))", "$2") // fbr& b

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