Is it possible to use curly braces in case selector in bash?

Question

I want to make some actions for matched lines in a case switch. And because strings are long, I wanted to use bash curly braces. But it does not work.

This code without curly braces works as expected:

for i in longstr_one longstr_two; do
    case $i in
    longstr_one| longstr_five)
        echo matched $i
        ;;
        *)
        echo no matches of $i
        ;;
    esac
done

And I got expected result:

matched longstr_one
no matches of longstr_two

But the following code with curly braces does not:

for i in longstr_one longstr_two; do
    case $i in
    longstr_{one|,five})
        echo matched $i
        ;;
        *)
        echo no matches of $i
        ;;
    esac
done   

And I got incorrect result:

no matches of longstr_one
no matches of longstr_two

Why it is not working? Is it possible to use curly braces in case selector in bash?

Answer 1

Since brace expansion isn't done in case patterns, you could use bash's extended glob syntax instead:

shopt -s extglob

for i in longstr_one longstr_two; do
    case $i in
    longstr_@(one|five) )
        echo "matched $i"
        ;;
        *)
        echo "no matches of $i"
        ;;
    esac
done

The syntax @(this|that|theother|...) matches any one of the subpatterns.