This section describes the regular expression syntax that can be used in the Find dialog box.
Pattern | Description |
. | Any one character except newline character. |
[abc] | a, b or c. |
[a-z] | Any character a to z inclusive. |
[^ac] | Any character except a and c. |
(x) | x, where x might be any regular expression. |
x* | Zero or more occurrences of x, where x may be any regular expression. |
x+ | One or more occurrences of x, where x may be any regular expression. |
x{n,m} | Between n and m occurrences of x, where x may be any regular expression. |
x{n} | n occurrences of x, where x may be any regular expression. |
x{n,} | n or more occurrences of x, where x may be any regular expression. |
x|y | x or y, where x and y may be any regular expression. |
xy | xy, where x and y may be any regular expression. |
^ | Beginning of a line. |
\A | Beginning of a line. |
$ | End of a line. |
\z | End of a line. |
\Z | End of a line. |
\< | Beginning of a word. |
\b | Beginning of a word. |
\> | End of a word. |
\B | End of a word. |
Class | Description |
\w | word |
\W | Not word |
\s | whitespace |
\S | Not whitespace |
\d | Digit |
\D | Not digit |
Class | Description |
[:alnum:] | Alphanumeric. same to the [a-zA-Z0-9]. |
[:alpha:] | Alphabetic. same to the [a-zA-Z]. |
[:blank:] | Spaces or tabs. |
[:cntrl:] | Any control characters. |
[:digit:] | Numeric digits. same to the [0-9]. |
[:graph:] | Any visible characters. (no whitespace) |
[:lower:] | Lower-case alphabetic. same to the [a-z]. |
[:print:] | Non-control characters. |
[:punct:] | Punctuation characters. |
[:space:] | Whitespace. |
[:upper:] | Upper-case alphabetic. same to the [A-Z]. |
[:xdigit:] | Hex digits. same to the [0-9a-fA-F]. |
Expression | Description |
[0-9]+ | One or more numeric characters. |
(foo)|(bar) | Either "foo" or "bar". |
\.html$ | Any string ending in ".html". |
^\. | Any string starting with a period. |