User Guide

108 Chapter 7 Using Web Development Languages
The regular expression appears in the working area at the top of the dialog box.
5 (Optional) Modify the contents of the working area.
You can insert other expressions in the working area to construct a more complex
expression. Expressions are inserted at the cursor position.
6Click Insert.
The contents of the working area in Expression Builder are inserted into the active
document, at the cursor position.
Using a special character
Because special characters are the operators in regular expressions, in order to
represent a special character as an ordinary one, you must precede it with a
backslash. To represent a backslash, for instance, use a two backslashes (\\).
Creating a single-character regular expression
You can use regular expressions in the Search > Extended Find and Replace
command to match complex string patterns.
The following rules govern one-character RegExp that match a single character:
• Special characters are: + * ? . [ ] ^ $ ( ) { } | \ &
• Any character that is not a special character matches itself.
• Use the keyboard (Tab, Enter) to match whitespace characters.
• The asterisk (*) matches the specified characters throughout the entire
document.
• The carat (^) matches the beginning of the document.
• The dollar sign ($) matches the end of the document.
• A backslash (\) followed by any special character matches the literal character
itself; that is, the backslash escapes the special character.
• The pound sign (#) and hyphen (-) characters must be escaped in expressions (##
--) just as though they were special characters.
• A period (.) matches any character, including a new line. To match any character
except a new line, use
[^#chr(13)##chr(10)#], which excludes the ASCII
carriage return and line feed codes.
• A set of characters enclosed in brackets ([]) is a one-character RegExp that
matches any of the characters in that set. For example,
[akm] matches an a, k, or
m. Note that if you want to include a closing square bracket (]) in square brackets,
it must be the first character. Otherwise, it does not work, even if you use \].