How to include lines in a regular expression search which might not be present?

Question

I'm using a regular expression search which is working as expected.

This searches for unified diff file entries and works as expected.

(re-search-forward
  (concat
    ;; Prefix '+++ '.
    "^"
    "\\-\\-\\-[[:blank:]]+.*\n"
    "\\+\\+\\+[[:blank:]]+.*\n"
    ;; May have trailing text which can be safely ignored.
    "@@[[:blank:]]+.*[[:blank:]]@@")
  nil t 1)

However some diffs have leading lines, eg:

 // some context text.
diff --git a/my_source.c b/my_source.c
index 43484a57f1c..5985d498606 100644
--- a/my_source.c
+++ b/my_source.c
 // some other context text.

My question is:

How can I include lines in the search which may or may not exist?

In this case: diff and index.

I tried this but it doesn't work, the \n literals prevent the following ^ from being detected.

(re-search-forward
  (concat
    ;; This fails :(
    "\\(\\|^diff[[:blank:]]+.*\n\\)"
    "\\(\\|^index[[:blank:]]+.*\n\\)"
    ;; Prefix '+++ '.
    "^"
    "\\-\\-\\-[[:blank:]]+.*\n"
    "\\+\\+\\+[[:blank:]]+.*\n"
    ;; May have trailing text which can be safely ignored.
    "@@[[:blank:]]+.*[[:blank:]]@@")
  nil t 1)

How can these lines be included in the search if they exist, otherwise left as empty groups if they aren't present?

Answer 1

? is the zero-or-one quantifier: \\(...\\)? says the group may or may not match anything.

Make it non-capturing if you don't care about backreferences to that group: \\(?:...\\)?

I tried this but it doesn't work, the \n literals prevent the following ^ from being detected.

^ only has its special meaning in certain positions; You can't put it anywhere and have it mean "the beginning of a line". C-hig (elisp)Regexp Special explains:

 For historical compatibility reasons, ‘^’ can be used
 only at the beginning of the regular expression, or
 after ‘\(’, ‘\(?:’ or ‘\|’.

More specifically, if you do use it in other positions then it matches a literal ^ character (but if you want to match a ^ then it's preferable -- for the sake of readability -- to escape it, even in these cases where you can get away without escaping it).

But note that you don't need a ^ to match the beginning of a line if the previous matched character was guaranteed to be a newline.