Find and Replace features support regular expressions, enabling you to find or replace strings based on patterns.
^ | A circumflex at the start of the string matches the start of a line. |
$ | A dollar sign at the end of the expression matches the end of a line. |
. | A period matches any character. |
* | An asterisk after a string matches none or any number of occurrences of that string. |
+ | A plus sign after a string matches one or more occurrences of that string. |
[ ] | Characters in brackets match any one character that appears in the brackets, but no others. |
[^] | A circumflex at the start of the string in brackets means NOT. |
[-] | A hyphen within the brackets signifies a range of characters. For example, [a-z] matches any character from a through z. |
( ) | Braces group characters or expressions. |
ab+ | Matches ab, abb, abbb ... |
ab* | Matches a, ab, abb ... |
a(bc)+ | Matches abc, abcbc ... |
<img[^>]+> | Matches HTML image tags e.g. <img src="image.gif"> |
[a-z0-9]+ | Matches any alphanumeric word e.g. abc, 123, abc123 ... |
In order to search for literal instances of characters that denotes regular expression operators, you must escape them with a \ . For example, \^ matches ^ and does not look for the start of a line.