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What you should know

By using regular expressions, you can search for character strings that match a defined pattern.

This provides greater flexibility and allows complex searches to be performed in a single pass. When performing a normal search without regular expressions, you can only use an invariable search string.

In the search options you specify whether or not WebTerm is to treat the search string as a regular expression and thus take account of the special meaning of meta characters.

When you perform a search with regular expressions, you can also specify that WebTerm is to find exact matches only. WebTerm then only finds those terms that precisely match the regular expression. Otherwise WebTerm finds all terms that contain the character string defined by the regular expression anywhere in the term.

Example: the regular expression st.r finds all occurrences of the character string st followed by any character, followed by r .

To find only those terms that exactly match the regular expression, select Exact matches only . WebTerm will then find star, stir, st@r, stur , for example.

If you do not select that option, WebTerm finds all terms that contain those character strings anywhere in the term. WebTerm will then find starter, monastir, nest@rabe, disturbance

If this function is not displayed If WebTerm does not show this function, that means that you do not have the necessary user permissions to use it (see here). Please contact your administrator for further assistance.

 

Searching with regular expressions may take some time When searching with regular expressions, WebTerm has to transfer substantial volumes of data over the Internet. You should therefore be aware that, depending on the speed of your Internet connection, searching with regular expressions may take some time.

Opting to search with regular expressions

1 Open the Search options menu on the Settings panel:

Fig. 6-10: You can search with regular expressions

2 To tell WebTerm to interpret the search string as a regular expression, select Regular expression .

If you deselect that option, WebTerm does not apply the regular expression rules when searching and interprets the search string literally.

If you want WebTerm to only find those terms that exactly match the regular expression, select Exact matches only .

The next time you perform a search, WebTerm will use the new settings.

You can save the settings you have made so that WebTerm automatically uses them the next time you log in. To do so, click the Save button (see here).