Regular Expressions

Home Page (Text Editor) | Overview | How Do I ... Topics | FAQ | Reference

Regular Expression	Description
`.`	(Period.) Any single character.
`[ ]`	Any one of the characters contained in the brackets, or any of an ASCII range of characters separated by a hyphen (-). For example, b[aeiou]d matches bad, bed, bid, bod, and bud, and r[eo]+d matches red, rod, reed, and rood, but not reod or roed. x[0-9] matches x0, x1, x2, and so on. If the first character in the brackets is a caret (^), then the regular expression matches any characters except those in the brackets.
`^`	The beginning of a line.
`$`	The end of a line.
``	Indicates a tagged expression to retain for replacement purposes. If the expression in the Find What text box is $lpsz$BigPointer, and the expression in the Replace With box is \1NewPointer, all selected occurrences of lpszBigPointer are replaced with lpszNewPointer. Each occurrence of a tagged expression is numbered according to its order in the Find What text box, and its replacement expression is \n, where 1 corresponds to the first tagged expression, 2 to the second, and so on. You can have up to nine tagged expressions.
`\~`	No match if the following character or characters occur. For example, b\~a+d matches bbd, bcd, bdd, and so on, but not bad. You can use this expression to prefix a group of characters you want to exclude, which is useful for excluding matches of particular words. For example, foo\~$lish$ matches "foo" in "food" and "afoot" but not in "foolish."
`\{c\!c\}`	Any one of the characters separated by the alternation symbol (\!). For example, \{j\!u\}+fruit finds jfruit, jjfruit, ufruit, ujfruit, uufruit, and so on.
`*`	None or more of the preceding characters or expressions. For example, ba*c matches bc, bac, baac, baaac, and so on.
`+`	At least one or more of the preceding characters or expressions. For example, ba+c matches bac, baac, baaac, but not bc.
`\{\}`	Any sequence of characters between the escaped braces. For example, \{ju\}+fruit finds jufruit, jujufruit, jujujufruit, and so on. Note that it will not find jfruit, ufruit, or ujfruit, because the sequence ju is not in any of those strings.
`[^]`	Any character except those following the caret (^) character in the brackets, or any of an ASCII range of characters separated by a hyphen (-). For example, x[^0-9] matches xa, xb, xc, and so on, but not x0, x1, x2, and so on.
`\:a`	Any single alphanumeric character [a – zA – Z0 – 9].
`\:b`	Any white-space character. The \:b finds tabs and spaces. There is no alternate syntax to express :b.
`\:c`	Any single alphabetic character [a – zA – Z].
`\:d`	Any decimal digit [0 – 9].
`\:n`	Any unsigned number \{[0-9]+\.[0-9]\![0-9]\.[0-9]+\![0-9]+\}. For example, \:n should match 123, .45, and 123.45.
`\:z`	Any unsigned decimal integer [0 – 9]+.
`\:h`	Any hexadecimal number [0 – 9a – fA – F]+.
`\:i`	Any C/C++ identifier [a – zA – Z_$][a – zA – Z0 – 9_$]+.
`\:w`	Any alphabetic string [a – zA – Z]+. The string need not be bounded by white space or appear at the beginning or the end of a line.
`\:q`	Any quoted string \{"[^"]"\!'[^']'\}.
`\`	Removes the pattern match characteristic in the Find What text box from the special characters listed above. For example, 100$ matches 100 at the end of a line, but 100\$ matches the character string 100$ anywhere on a line.