Regular expressions

The following regular expression characters are supported:

• ^ Circumflex - Constrain to start of line

  A circumflex as the first character of the string constrains matches to start of lines.

  Examples:

  ^Win Match lines beginning with Win

  ^Grep Match lines beginning with Grep

• $ Dollar - Constrain to end of line

  A dollar as the last character of the string constrains matches to end of lines.

  Examples:

  then$ Match lines ending with then

  ^end$ Match lines consisting of the single word end

• . Period - Match any character

  A period anywhere in the string matches any single character.

  Examples:

  H..p Matches Help, Hoop, Harp etc.

  H.w Matches Huw, How, Haw etc.

  ^Win.ers Matches lines beginning with Winders, Winners etc.

• * Asterisk - Match 0 or more

  An expression followed by a asterisk matches zero or more occurrences of that expression.

  Examples:

  to* Matches t, to, too etc.

  00* matches 0, 00, 000, 0000 etc.

  Note that specifying a single character followed by a * will cause Windows Grep to fail.

• + Plus - Match 1 or more

  An expression followed by a plus sign matches one or more occurrences of that expression.

  Examples:

  to+ Matches to, too etc.

  10+ Matches 10, 100, 1000, 10000 etc.

  /([0-9]+/) Matches (0), (12464), (12) etc.

  Note that specifying a single character followed by a + will cause Windows Grep to fail.

• ? Question mark - Optionally match

  An expression followed by a question mark optionally matches that expression.

  Examples:

  to? Matches t and to

  10? Matches 1 and 10

  Note that specifying a single character followed by a ? will cause Windows Grep to fail.

• () Brackets - Expression group

  Brackets can be used to group characters together prior to using a * + or ?.

  Examples:

  Win(dows)? Matches Win and Windows

  B(an)*a Matches Ba, Bana and Banana

• [ ] Square brackets - Character group

  A string enclosed in square brackets matches any character in that string, but no others. If the first character of the string is a circumflex the expression matches any character except the characters in the string. A range of characters may be specified by two characters separated by a -. These should be given in ASCII order (A-Z, a-z, 0-9 etc.)

  Examples:

  {[0-9]} Matches {0}, {4}, {5} etc.

  /([0-9]+/) Matches (100), (342), (4), (23456) etc.

  H[uo]w Matches Huw and How

  Gre[^py] Matches Green, Great etc. but not Grep, Grey etc.

  [z-a] Matches nothing

  ^[A-Z] Match lines beginning with an upper-case letter

• \ Backslash - Quote next character

  A backslash quotes any character. This allows a search for a character that is usually a regular expression specifier.

  Examples:

  \$ Matches a dollar sign $

  \+ Matches a +