1. Scope.
The scope of the search can be:
1. The current
document.
2. All loaded
documents.
If the check-box 'Include icons' is checked, the iconized
documents will be included in the search. If not, they are ignored.
2. Direction.
It can be forward, backward, or wrap.
3. Match.
It can be:
1. Exact, i.e. the
word should match exactly.
2. Regular
expression.
Regular expressions are written in a special format, that
allows you to express ambiguous matching patterns.
This is done using
special characters within the search expression that are assigned a special
meaning in the context of a search:
The '^' character is
used to represent the beginning of a line. For instance the expression
^S'
will match all lines that begin with an 'S'.
The '$' character
means the last character in the line. For instance the expression
'S$' will match all lines that end with S.
The '+' character
means an occurrence of 1 or more times the preceeding expression. For instance
the expression
ab+
will match ab, abb, abbbb etc.
The '*' character
will match zero or more times the occurrence of the previous expression. Using
the previous example, the character string 'a' will match the expression 'ab*'.
You can specify a
range of characters using brackets, for instance you can specify the digits by
using a range expression of
[0-9],
or the range of all
lowercase letters with the expression [a-z].
The point means that
ANY character can be found at the given position. For instance the expression
aB.C
means that the character strings 'abXC' or 'ab C' will
match: any character can be in the third position.
When you need to
specify one of the special characters in a search you can put a backslash
before it to specify that you want just that character without a special
meaning. For instance the expression 'ab' will match only the sequence of
characters 'ab+'.