How do you use Notepad++ regex pipe | for strings longer than one character?

Question

I'm trying to get notepad++ to regex find all instances of "abc" and "def" in the following sentence:

The abc went to the def.

None of the following syntaxes seem to work:

• abc|def
• [abc|def]
• (abc)|(def)
• (abc|def)

NOTE: "[a|d]" matches any instance of "a" or "d" when I tested

Answer 1

It's nothing special about "longer than one character", Notepad++ doesn't support the | character in regex. Not even "a|d" works. See the regex help page. Version 6.1.1 of Notepad++ now supports |.

I'd suggest using an editor with a proper regex implementation like gvim or UltraEdit.

Answer 2

Upgrade to Notepad++ v6. From the changelog: "PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) is supported." I've verified that | works in regex search when using Notepad++ v6.