Regular Expressions for Find and Replace

Last modified: October 23, 2019

The Find and Replace window contains a list of symbols and signs which you can use to quickly find and replace required patterns of text. They are called regular expressions.

To select a regular expression, do the following:

1. In the Find and Replace window, select the Use check box and choose Regular Expressions from the drop-down list. The arrow button next to the Find what field becomes active.

2. Click the arrow button and select a regular expression from the drop-down list. It is inserted into the Find what field.

The drop-down list contains the following regular expressions:

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.
\n	Line break	Matches a platform-independent line break. In a Replace expression, inserts a line break.
[]	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, (databaseImanagement) 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.
{}	Tagged 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]+).