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REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
EXAMPLES
 These
regular expressions are examples of how to
search files with Finders Keepers™ to find text that may have variable
characters.
Please note that if you are not comfortable with regular expressions, you may
use an approximate search or a sound-alike search to find text that may be
misspelled or have variations in the searched files. See 4
ways to find.
Regular Expression
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Result
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^They
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Finds They at
the beginning of a line.
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Ishmael$
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Finds Ishmael
at the end of a line.
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Wh..e
|
Finds White, Whale,
While, Whole, or any other text beginning with Wh,
ending with e, and having two characters between.
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^Wh..e
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Finds White, Whale,
While, Whole, and so on, at the beginning of a line.
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se*
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Finds s, se,
see, seee, or any other text beginning with an s
followed by zero or more occurrences of e.
Finds sea too.
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se+
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Finds se, see,
seee, or any other text beginning with an s followed by one or more occurrences of e. Finds
sea too. It does not
find “s” stranded without an “e”.
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[MobyDick]
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Finds M, o,
or any other letter in “Moby Dick”.
Does not find anything in “Ishmael”.
[MobyDIck] would find I in “Ishmael”.
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[MobyDick]+oby
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Finds Moby in
“Moby Dick”.
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d[^aeiu]ck
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Finds dock but
not “Dick” or “duck”.
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\<[Mm]o+[Bb]*y
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Finds text that begins
a word with M or m, then has one or more of o, zero
or more of B or b, and a y. Finds Moby but not “Mory”.
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sea|whale|leg
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Finds text that
contains sea, whale, or leg.
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\$
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Finds a dollar sign.
The backslash turns the $ into a literal dollar sign
instead of a symbol for an end of line in a regular expression.
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{his}{[ -z]+}{[kl]eg}
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Finds “his wooden
leg” or “his whale of a leg” or “his whole keg”, as well as
other such text. Except for
the curly brackets, this expression is the same as his[ -z]+[kl]eg.
The curly brackets divide the expression into sub-expressions,
which may be referenced by number in Replacement Expressions.
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([0-9])
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Matches (0), (1), (2),
(3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8) and (9)
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([0-9]*)
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Matches (), (0),
(123), (2512), etc.
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