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.