Tutorial 4 | VI Editors | Jump to PICO Editors tutorial

When using the [ / ] or [ ? ] commands a line will be cleared along the bottom of the screen. You enter the search string followed by [ RETURN ] .

The string in the command [ / ] or [ ? ] can be a regular expression. A regular expression is a description of a set of characters. The description is build using text intermixed with special characters. The special characters in regular expressions are . * [] ^$.

• .       Matches any single character except newline.
• \       Escapes any special characters.
• *      Matches 0 or More occurances of the preceding character.
• []      Matches exactly one of the enclosed characters.
• ^      Match of the next character must be at the begining of the line.
• $      Matches characters preceding at the end of the line.
• [^]    Matches anything not enclosed after the not character.
• [-]    Matches a range of characters.

The only way to get use to the regular expression is to use them. Following is a series of examples.

• c.pe                           Matches cope, cape, caper etc
• c\.pe                          Matches c.pe, c.per etc
• sto*p                         Matches stp, stop, stoop etc
• car.*n                        Matches carton, cartoon, carmen etc
• xyz.*                          Matches xyz to the end of the line.
• ^The                          Matches any line starting with The.
• atime$                        Matches any line ending with atime.
• ^Only$                       Matches any line with Only as the only word in the line.
• b[aou]rn                     Matches barn, born, burn.
• Ver[D-F]                   Matches VerD, VerE, VerF.
• Ver[^1-9]                  Matches Ver followed by any non digit.
• the[ir][re]                   Matches their,therr, there, theie.
• [A-Za-z][A-Za-z]*    Matches any word