Regular expressions

The regular expressions accepted by the StringMatcher object and the "Find/Replace" dialog boxes must conform to the following syntax.

Characters

Syntax	Signification

x	The character x - with the exception of special characters * ? + - \| () [ ]
\x	The character x

Atoms

Syntax	Signification

a	the character a
[abc]	the class formed by the characters a, b or c
[a-z]	all the characters from a to z
[a-zA-Z]	all the characters from a to z, or from A to Z
[^a]	any character except a
[^a-z]	any character except those between a and z (inclusive).
.	any character except the line break or carriage return (equivalent to [^\n\r].

Note: using parentheses or the +, ?, *, or | operators is not allowed within a character class specification.

Cardinality

Syntax	Signification

X*	zero or more occurence(s) of the letter X
X+	one or more occurence(s) of the letter X
X?	at least one occurence(s) of the letter X

Operators

Precedence rules

The operators below are listed in descending order of priority :

Using parentheses modifes these priorities.

Examples

Example	Corresponding strings

foo	the string "foo"
a\|bc	a or b, followed by c (in other words "ac" or "bc")
a\|(bc)	the string "a" or the string "bc"
ab+	the strings starting with a followed by one or more b's
(ab)+	the strings "ab", "abab", "ababab", etc.
[a-z]+	all words
[a\-z]+	all successions of characters a, z, -
dim [a-z][a-z0-9_]* as +(new +)?timer	all declarations of an object of type Timer.
[0-9]+( +)\|[\t,;][tTfF]( +)\|[\t,;][a-zA-Z]+\n	a numeric field, a boolean field, a non-empty text field then a line break, separated by spaces or a delimiter
[0-9]+	a positive integer
[0-9][0-9]?/[0-9][0-9]?/(19)\|(20)[0-9][0-9]	a date
[\+\-]?[0-9]+(\.[0-9]*)?([eE][\+\-]?[0-9]+)?	a number in scientific notation
[0-9a-z_]+(\.\|-[0-9a-z_]+)*@[0-9a-z_]+(\.\|-[0-9a-z_]+)+	an email address