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Regular expressions
What is a regular expression?
Regular expressions allow you to search based on rules that form search expressions. This gives you a very powerful tool for search and replace.
You can read about regular expressions in many places - a short overview will follow bellow.
To those who prefer to read a printed documentation I recommend the following books:
Regular Expressions or
Regular Expressions Quick Reference.
Overview about regular expressions
Jokers
. | Any single character |
(hello|world) | Either 'hello' or 'world' |
[1-6] | A number between 1 and 6 |
[c-h] | A lower case character between c and h |
[D-M] | An upper case character between D and M |
[^a-z] | Absence of lower case a to z |
[adx] | One of the characters a, d or x |
[a-z13] | a lower case character or 1 or 3 |
Frequency
n* | Zero or more of 'n' |
n+ | One or more of 'n' |
n? | A possible 'n' |
n{2} | Exactly two of 'n' |
n{2,} | At least 2 or more of 'n' |
n{2,4} | From 2 to 4 of 'n' |
Group
( ) | Parenthesis to group expressions |
Position
^ | The pattern must be at the start of the string |
$ | The pattern must be at the end of the string |
Insert
When you want to re-insert a found string in the new name you must use a backslash followed by the number of the group. The complete search string is group 0.
Example: Search for "(Renamer[0-9]*)(Mac)", the text is "I frequently use Renamer4Mac":
\0 | = Renamer4Mac | = Complete result |
\1 | = Renamer4 | = 1st group: "(Renamer[0-9]*)" |
\2 | = Mac | = 2nd group: "(Mac)" |
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