Find Text with Regular Expressions
The Find and Replace window contains a list of symbols and signs which you can use to find and replace required patterns of text. They are called regular expressions. To open the Find and Replace window, navigate to the Edit menu and select Find and Replace > Find.
Selecting Use in the Find and Replace window allows choosing either Regular Expressions or Wildcards. By choosing Regular Expressions, you unlock the following set of expressions in the Expression Builder:
| Syntax | Expression | Description |
|---|---|---|
| . | Any single character | Matches any single character except a line break. |
| * | Zero or more | Matches zero or more occurrences of the preceding expression, finding all possible matches. |
| + | One or more | Matches at least one occurrence of the preceding expression. |
| ^ | Beginning of line | Anchors the match string to the beginning of a line. |
| $ | End of line | Anchors the match string to the end of a line. |
| < | Beginning of word | Matches only when a word begins at this point in the text. |
| > | End of word | Matches only when a word ends at this point in the text. |
| [] | Any one character in the set | Matches any one of the characters within the []. To specify a range of characters, list the starting and ending character separated by a dash (-), as in [a-z]. |
| [^] | Any one character not in the set | Matches any character not in the set of characters following the ^. |
| I | Or | Matches either the expression before or the one after the OR symbol (I). Mostly used within a group. For example, (database/management)system matches “database system” and “management system”. |
| \ | Escape Special Character | Matches the character that follows the backslash () as a literal. This allows you to find the characters used in regular expression notation, such as { and ^. For example, \^ Searches for the ^ character. |
| {} | Tag Expression | Matches text tagged with the enclosed expression. |
| :i | SQL identifier | Matches the expression ([a-zA-Z_$][a-zA-Z0-9_$]*). |
| :q | Quoted string | Matches the expression ((“[^”]“)I(‘[^’]’)). |
| :b | Space or Tab | Matches either space or tab characters. |
| :z | Integer | Matches the expression ([0-9]+). |
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