If one assumes he really needs regexp - which is perfectly reasonable in many contexts - the problem is that the specific regexp variety needs to be specified. For example:
egrep '^(100|[1-9]|[1-9][0-9])$'
grep -E '^(100|[1-9]|[1-9][0-9])$'
work fine if the (...|...) alternative syntax is available. In other contexts, they'd be backslashed like \(...\|...\)