I just stumbled over a beautiful but not commonly known regexp search solution. Excuse my stupidity, but I felt like a thread about common regexp solutions would encourage users to use them
And maybe others to contribute with their special tricks with regexp too...in many cases you will be discouraged to use the so called "greedy" quantifiers
+ - one or more occurrences
* - zero or more occurrences
example:
you want to search for any opening link HTML tag <a href=link>
The common problem is that you shouldn't write:
<a href=.*>
as it would select the entire text from the first <a href= till the last > character in the entire file.
Many handbooks advise to use some ugly method like
<a href=[^<]*>
where the [^<]* means search zero or more occurrences of any character except < which is sooo ugly
But hey! We have LAZY quantifiers
Code: Select all
Greedy Lazy
* *?
+ +?
{n,} {n,}?
with which you can do it in a snap like this:
<a href=.*?>
Naturally the dot '.' is any character but since you use *? the search will stop by the first occurence of the > character
TRY IT, YOU WON'T REGRET IT!!!
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...and in that fashion it can get complex:
lets say you want to search for any sequence of tags for HTML table cell
<td any parameters>anything<a href=anything>anything</a>anything</td>
you don't have to perform magic for this one with the lazy quantifiers,
just remember that instead of * (as in non-regexp filters, searches) you should use .*?
so you can imagine it with the 'stars' first just like
<td*>*<a href=*>*</a>*</td>
the seqence in regexp is simple then
<td.*?>.*?<a href=.*?>.*?</a>.*?</td>
Nice!
I've got this from a genious chm help file called SAMS - Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes - 2004.
