help with regular expressions

[Maia]

I'm trying to parse the playerNames from the combat log. Therefor I'm watching some events. DamageMeters is using string.find such as:

string.gfind(arg1, "(.+) hits (.+) for (%d+)")
string.gfind(arg1, "(.+) crits (.+) for (%d+)")
string.gfind(arg1, "(.+) hits (.+) for (%d+)%. %((%d+) resisted%)")
string.gfind(arg1, "(.+) crits (.+) for (%d+)%.")

Well, as I only need the playerName I guess I can combine these into one regexp:

string.gfind(arg1, "(%a+) hits (%a+) .+")

This works. What doesn't work is:

string.gfind(arg1, "(%a+) hits|crits (%a+) .+")
nor does
string.gfind(arg1, "(%a+) (hits|crits) (%a+) .+")

what am I doing wrong?

[barebone]

Lua does not use POSIX regular expressions (regexp) for pattern matching. Go www.lua.org for further explanation - seems it involved too much code, so basically they reinvented regular expressions in a "light" way.

Not even sure you can do OR (|) in lua, havent found any documentation.