There are two way to search and replace a string. You can use the find and replace dialogs, or the CUTE command box as described in the previous chapter. Regular expressions are supported too.
In a regular expression, special characters interpreted are:
Matches any character
This marks the start of a region for tagging a match.
This marks the end of a tagged region.
Where n is 1 through 9 refers to the first through ninth tagged region when replacing. For example, if the search string was Fred\([1-9];\)XXX and the replace string was Sam\1YYY, when applied to Fred2XXX this would generate Sam2YYY.
This matches the start of a word using Scintilla's definitions of words.
This matches the end of a word using Scintilla's definition of words.
This allows you to use a character x that would otherwise have a special meaning. For example, \[ would be interpreted as [ and not as the start of a character set.
This indicates a set of characters, for example, [abc] means any of the characters a, b or c. You can also use ranges, for example [a-z] for any lower case character.
The complement of the characters in the set. For example, [^A-Za-z] means any character except an alphabetic character.
This matches the start of a line (unless used inside a set, see above).
This matches the end of a line.
This matches 0 or more times. For example, Sa*m matches Sm, Sam, Saam, Saaam and so on.
This matches 1 or more times. For example, Sa+m matches Sam, Saam, Saaam and so on.