Using Regular Expressions
Find and Replace features support regular expressions, enabling you to find or replace strings based on patterns.
Regular expression operators
| ^ |
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. |
Examples
| 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 ... |
Escaping operators
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. |
