 <p>I don't think your problem is the OR operator, but the <a href="http://www.regular-expressions.info/repeat.html#greedy">greediness</a> of the <code>.*</code>. It will match your full string, and then <em>back</em>-track until the following expressions match. The first match in this backtracking process will be <code>'He said, "You're cool."' , 'Rawr</code>+<code>')</code>. Try <code>.*?</code> instead!</p>