Finding Text
See Also: Replacing Text

These examples all use UNIX extended regular expression syntax.

1. Find all trailing spaces:

[ \t]+$

finds one or more spaces or tabs followed by the end of line.

2. Find an empty line:

^$

finds the beginning of a line immediately followed by its end.

3. Find everything on a line:

^.*

finds the beginning of a line, followed by zero or more of any characters, up to the end of the line.

4. Find "$12.34":

\$12\.34

Note that '.' and '$' have been escaped using the backslash to hide their regular expression meanings.

5. Find any valid C language variable name:

\<[ a-zA-Z][ a-zA-Z0-9]*

finds a word starting with an underscore or alphabetic character, followed by zero or more underscores or alphanumeric characters.

6. Find an inner-most bracketed expression:

([^()]*)

finds a left bracket, followed by zero or more characters excluding left and right brackets, followed by a right bracket.

7. Find a repeated expression:

\([0-9]+\)-\1

This uses a tagged expression "\(...\)" to find one or more digits, followed by a hyphen, followed by the string matched by the tagged expression. So this regular expression will find 12-12, but not 12-34.