Regular Expressions

TopStyle's find and replace features support Regular Expressions (RE), which enable you to find or replace strings based on patterns. The following regular expression operators are supported:

a+One or more occurrences of a
a*Zero or more occurences of a
a?Zero or one (i.e. optional) occurence of a
a|bEither a or b
a||ba or b or both a and b in any order
abca followed by b followed by c
[abc]A single character, one of a or b or c
[a-b]A single character, ranging in value from a to b inclusive
[^abc]A single character, any except a, b or c
(abc)a followed by b followed by c
"abc"The letters a followed by b followed by c with no special significance attached to a, b or c
.Any character except a new line
\tThe tab character
\nThe newline character
\rThe return character


In order to search for literal instances of characters that would otherwise denote RE operators, you must escape them by preceding them with a \ . For example, to find a plus (+) sign, use \+

Regular expression examples:

[0-9]+pt Match all "pt" units
#[0-9]+ Match all hexadecimal colors
\/\*[^*]*\*+([^/][^*]*\*+)*\/ Match all CSS comments
[Uu][Rr][Ll]\([^\)]*\) Match all URL values
\{[^\}\{]*\} Match all declaration blocks

Note that regular expressions are powerful -- and dangerous. You should always run a search on your REs to make sure you are matching the strings that you want before running a RE replace.