No, you can't. Character classes are for characters, not strings. Use (?:ease)?.

And that other character class you have is a bit redundant; \s contains \n and \r.

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Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker, who'd like a job (NYC-area)
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;