Search for mismatched length alternative pattern?

Question

My file consists of the following text

one
bone
stone
cuttlebone
minestrone
cornerstone

and I want to select all instances of bone and stone, so I get the following highlighted text:

one
BONE
STONE
cuttleBONE
minestrone
cornerSTONE

NB: capitals indicate highlighted text since I can't format in code.

I have tried the following search patterns, but none of them work

/bone|stone
/[st|b]one
/[\(st\)b]one
/[bst]one
/[b(st)]one

The problem is stone and bone are different lengths, and I don't know how to match to two different length options.

How can I match all instances of stone and bone in my file?

Answer 1

You need to escape the |:

/bone\|stone

If you want to reuse the one part, you can do:

/\(b\|st\)one

This create a sub expression b\|st and add one to it.

As DJ McMayhem suggested, you can use the \v "verymagic" flag:

/\v(b|st)one 

Answer 2

Nobe4's answer is spot-on. Here's an alternative.

vim-abolish. This plugin works fantastic for searching and/or replacing simple variants on a word. For example, let's say you want to turn 'child' to 'adult', while also getting 'children' to 'adults', and all case-variants. You can do that with:

:Subvert/child{,ren}/adult{,s}/g

In your case, you can do a subvert search with:

:Subvert /{st,b}one