[SOLVED]find regular expression not working
lazarus / 9-Editor

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hy · 2014-10-07 16:14

Hi,
maybe i am completely wrong but when searching for:
Code: [Select]if p*<> NIL thenwith regular expressions checked, it
deosn't find anything but there are hundreds of occurences.
What am I doing wrong?
thanks in advance

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Mike.Cornflake · 2014-10-07 16:26

Seems to be related to the spaces.  Works for me if I search for only
p*<>

As for why spaces don't work?  Sorry - not a regex guy, and I've never
used this functionality before...

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hy · 2014-10-07 17:25

Thanks it's not the whitespace but you brought me into the correct
answer.
I needed to prepend the *(asterisk) with a . (dot)

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Leledumbo · 2014-10-07 23:41

Regular expressions has meta characters, which have special meaning
inside the expression. To use them as normal character, they have to
be escaped by '\'. So, '*' must be written as '\*'.

Prepending with a dot has different meaning that your intention. * is
a 0 or more quantifier, so p.* means: "p followed by any character,
zero or more times". While p\* means : "p followed by asterisk
character".

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hy · 2014-10-08 09:59

Thanks Leledumbo, I am aware of the meaning of regular expressions. I
just omitted the dot "." before the asterisk.
Stupid me...